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Technical · the standard

The Gaia Enabled cabin standard

What a cabin needs for central control to work properly. Published openly, because if we are asking something of your cabin supplier you should be able to read exactly what it is.

Measure it · Fix it · Scale it · Check how your site compares

A Gaia Enabled cabin is your supplier’s cabin with our control unit fitted at manufacture. We don’t supply cabins; you keep your existing supplier, always.

The standard below is the same whoever that supplier is. Most of it describes a well-built, well-maintained cabin rather than anything unusual.

The five requirements, and why each one matters

1. Local on/off switches and thermostats removed, covered or locked out

Why: this is the single most important item on the list, and it is there because of a failure we have seen happen.

If a site can override a heater locally and Gaia is also controlling it, both are fighting for the same circuit. What happens in practice is that somebody switches the kit off at the mains, and the whole system stops delivering, usually without anyone reporting it.

Removing local control isn’t about taking something away from the site team. It is about there being one place a decision gets made. If a room is too cold, the site team asks and we change it, and because we changed it, we know about it.

2. Heaters, AC, dehumidifiers and water heaters installed correctly and in good working order

Why: control cannot fix broken hardware. An appliance that has failed into a high-consumption state will keep drawing whatever it draws during the periods we allow it to run.

The useful side-effect is that once every circuit is measured, faulty kit becomes visible rather than suspected. That is a quality conversation with your supplier, with a circuit reference attached.

3. Door closers fitted; doors and windows close properly

Why: a heater in a cabin with a propped-open door is heating the compound. No control strategy survives that, and door sensors will simply report it happening repeatedly.

Closers are cheap and they are the difference between a rule working and a rule being overwhelmed.

4. Lighting and socket circuits grouped and labelled to the Gaia specification

Why: we can only switch a circuit as a whole. If lighting for a room shares a circuit with something that must stay live, that circuit cannot be controlled at all.

Labelling matters for a duller reason: at commissioning we map each physical circuit to the software. Clear, durable labels turn that into a short job. Handwritten tape turns it into circuit tracing.

The labelling scheme in full

5. Circuits and control wiring suitable for central control

Why: practical limits. A circuit routed through a contactor must be on a breaker of 25A or less, and both poles of a contactor must control identical appliances in the same cabin, never split across two rooms.

Where a load is outside those limits it stays monitor-only: measured, never switched. That applies to life-safety circuits and showers by default, and to anything else you designate as critical.

Other ways to start

  1. Recommended first step

    Get DataMate free on your next project

    We monitor your cabins until consumption settles, and you get the wastage review.

    Your cost: coordination, and one engineer at the board.

    Get DataMate free
  2. Check how your site compares

    Answer a few questions about your welfare setup, and see whether it looks higher-risk than comparable monitored sites.

    Your cost: 20 seconds and an email address for the result.

    Check how your site compares
  3. Talk about full AutoMate

    For teams ready to standardise cabins across projects.

    Your cost: a 30-minute call.

    Book an AutoMate call

What changes once a cabin meets the standard

Two things, one commercial and one practical.

Control gets materially more effective. On a cabin that isn’t enabled, automation is more noticeable to the people in it; there is more overriding, more friction and a smaller saving. We will say so honestly if we are working on non-enabled cabins.

Decommissioning becomes a non-event. The unit arrived in the cabin and it leaves in the cabin. There is nothing to remove and no visit to coordinate at the end of a project.

Getting there

You don’t have to start here. On your first sites we install into cabins as they are, and the standard becomes relevant when you roll out at scale and your supplier starts fitting units at manufacture.

The supplier side of this · How the stages work

A PDF of this document is available for O&M manuals and email attachments. The page is canonical; the PDF is generated from it.

Source: AM-TECH-01 cabin requirements, July 2026.