Concept — Commercial Zone Controller
Veylo Pro
Comfort is an operating cost. This is where it gets spent.
Three things on the glass and nothing else: what it is right now, two buttons to change it, and today’s plan in plain words. No modes, no fan menu, no programming screen. Built for a dining room, an auditorium and a kitchen that answer to a GM, a regional manager and a utility program at the same time — three parties who each believe they own the number.
Predictive by trade — learns service hours
Locked, but never a black box
Always says why — and who
Zones and units, never rooms
Curtailment with guardrails
Five things a business breaks
The comfort assumptions that hold nowhere a customer can walk in
Nobody is the occupant
A dining room that wants 70°, a kitchen that will never get there, guests who never touch it, and a GM who owns every complaint. The device serves the zone, not a person.
Anyone may touch it
A line cook sets it to 60° and nobody puts it back. Plastic guards fix tampering by making legitimate changes impossible too. Veylo Pro locks the range, not the device.
Occupancy is a spike
An 11:30 rush, a 7:10 showtime, a Tuesday that is dead. Nothing repeats on a weekly clock, so learning runs on the trade calendar: POS covers, ticketed seats, door counts.
Savings land on the P&L
$1.80 motivates nobody on a shift; $340,000 across 280 sites moves a budget. Chains enroll in curtailment only when the kitchen keeps working and the GM was told first. The screen states both.
Failure is quiet
A failing unit does not stop; it runs, bills, and misses by four degrees. A back office notices in a season. The wall calls out a unit that runs and never arrives, before the complaint does.
Three trades, one controller
The learning model is the same; the signal it learns from is not
Restaurant
Dining, bar, kitchen and office on one site, wildly different loads. Kitchen exhaust pulls the building negative; the dining room pays for it.
Learns from
POS cover counts, hood runtime, door opens, patio hours
Never touches
Kitchen setpoints during service. Back of house is exempt from every curtailment.
Cinema
Auditoriums sit empty then fill to capacity in eight minutes. Load is bodies, not weather, and the room must be silent while it works.
Learns from
Showtimes and seats sold per screen, cleaning turns, CO₂ rise rate
Never touches
Fan speed mid-feature. Ramps land between screenings, never during one.
Retail & c-store
Long hours, thin staff, doors that never close, and refrigeration rejecting heat into the sales floor all day.
Learns from
Door counts, register activity, case defrost cycles, daypart traffic
Never touches
Anything that would push the sales floor above the refrigeration ambient limit.
Hardware
3.4″ dia · 0.86″ deep · built for a wall the public walks past, in a building nobody owns personally
Dining · Store 1024
70°
Open hours · on setpoint
Managed · ±2°
Front elevation · 1:1 at 400px = 3.4″
Lens
Hard-coated polycarbonate, not glass. Survives a tray, a mop handle and a decade of grease film. Wipe-down rated.
Mount
Security-torx to a universal commercial backplate. Covers common 4″ and 6″ cutouts, so a swap is a 20-minute job.
Halo ring
Readable across a 60-seat dining room. Cyan cooling, amber heating, mint curtailment, red service exception.
Sensing
Temperature, humidity, CO₂ and 60 GHz occupancy density — a headcount estimate, not a motion bit.
Wiring
24 V with C-wire, 3H/2C, PoE option, BACnet/IP and Modbus out to an existing BMS. Wired Ethernet where Wi-Fi is a liability.
No speaker, no mic
Voice ships off. A dining room does not need a listening device on the wall, and no franchise IT review will approve one.
Authority, made visible
Every setpoint on the wall shows who set it and how long it survives
Staff
±2° on the glass
Nothing to unlock and nothing to ask for. Wide enough to fix a real complaint, narrow enough to be harmless, and it expires at the next scheduled change.
Manager
±6°, from the app
Private event, broken door, patio heat — the GM has a real lever, and it lives where the change is attributed to a name instead of to whoever knew the code.
Corporate
Sets the band itself
Fleet policy pushed to 300 sites. The wall names the policy in plain words — never “locked” with no explanation.
Utility
Curtailment, with an exit
Front of house drifts up 3°. Kitchen untouched. The GM is notified before it starts and can opt this site out on the glass.
On-device states
480×480 round face, shown at 300 px
Dining · Open
70°
On setpoint. 62 covers seated.
Managed · ±2°
44%
710 ppm
Open hours, on setpoint
The default face. Zone name first, because a site has six of these.
−
+
Set to
68°
Lowest staff may go. Back to 70° at 3:40 PM.
Wider range set in the app
Staff nudge, at the limit
The + dims rather than disappears, and the wall names the way up instead of only saying no.
Peak event · 4–7 PM
72°
+2°
Pre-cooled to 67° at 3 PM. Kitchen unaffected. GM notified 3:45 PM.
Opt this site out
Curtailment
Every guardrail chains ask for, stated on the glass rather than in a contract.
Screen 4 · Pre-cool
74°
→ 68°
218 seats sold for 7:10. Room fills in 8 min — cooling low and early so the fan is quiet by trailers.
Ready 6:58 PM
Showtime pre-cool
Load is bodies. The number that matters is seats sold, not outdoor temperature.
Dining · Closed
62°
Closed at 11 PM. Coasting 58–80°. Warm again by 10:20 AM.
$41 saved overnight
Unoccupied setback
Coasts on a wide deadband instead of paying to hold an empty zone at a number.
Service needed
78°
→ 70°
RTU-2 has run 4 hrs 20 min without arriving. Ticket opened at 1:14 PM.
Tech ETA tomorrow, 9 AM
Equipment exception
Runs-and-never-arrives is the failure that hides for a season. The wall says it first.
Fresh air · Lobby
1,410 ppm
CO₂ above target with a full house. Outside-air damper opened to 40%.
Temperature held at 70°
Demand ventilation
The one warm face. Air, not temperature, is what a packed lobby actually needs.
Offline
70°
No network since 2:14 PM. Last known schedule and staff band still enforced locally.
7 days of logs buffered
Offline
A retail uplink drops weekly. Policy and logging both survive it, so the business never loses an hour of record.
The rule, restated for a business
If Veylo Pro changes a zone, the wall says why, who authorised it, and when it ends — before the GM has to call anyone.
See it running: the interactive Pro controller →