Industry Solutions

District Heating and Thermal Plant SCADA

3D SCADA for district heating and thermal plants. Monitor heat exchangers, substations and networks in real time from any browser.

District heating networks are long, distributed and largely invisible. Heat generated at a central plant travels through kilometres of pipework to substations serving individual buildings. Kingfisher models the network and the plant together in the browser, so operators can see generation, distribution and delivery in a single live view.

What you can monitor

  • Generation plant: boilers, CHP units, heat pumps, thermal stores, flue and combustion data
  • Heat exchangers: primary and secondary flow and return temperatures, approach, fouling indicators
  • Substations: per-building supply conditions, control valve position, local demand
  • Distribution network: flow and return temperatures across the network, differential pressure, pump status
  • Heat metering: consumption per substation or per customer, network losses between generation and delivery
  • Thermal storage: charge state, charge and discharge rates

Network-level and substation-level views can be built from the same scene, so operations and commercial teams work from one model.

How it connects

District heating sites commonly run a mix of ages and vendors. Kingfisher connects natively to Modbus RTU and Modbus TCP, which covers the majority of heat meters, substation controllers and older plant equipment, and to OPC UA where a newer central plant control system is in place. BACnet/IP is supported where substations sit inside building management systems, and Siemens S7 where plant controllers are Siemens.

That mix matters here more than in most verticals, because a heating network usually cannot be standardised on one protocol. It was not built at one time.

Why 3D for district heating specifically

Heat networks fail in ways that are fundamentally spatial. Temperature drop between plant and substation, a poorly performing branch, an area with unexplained losses: these are questions about where, and they are difficult to answer from a tag list. Showing the network geographically with live temperatures and flows makes distribution problems visible in a way that a table of values does not.

The same view helps commercially. Heat loss between what is generated and what is billed is a direct margin question, and seeing it laid out across the network tends to make the conversation about it much shorter.

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