In November 2022, I set up a thermal energy storage experiment on the balcony of my Saigon apartment. It was a cylindrical container filled with sand, heated to over 300°C by resistive elements and monitored by a handful of temperature sensors I'd wired up myself.
It was supposed to be a weekend project. Everything Alpha Bits does in IoT today grew out of it.
Looking back, the experiment was the clearest case of what I now call Data-First Principle Thinking, the mindset that later led us into digital transformation consulting, data mining and AI workflow automation. In 2022 I didn't have a name for it. I had sand, sensors and questions.
The experiment
The idea was to convert electricity into heat, store that heat in sand, and measure how long it lasted. Conversion efficiency came out at 98%, so almost all the electrical energy became thermal energy. The number itself was less interesting than what I saw once I started monitoring the system properly.
I put temperature sensors at several depths in the sand and added ambient condition monitors, energy consumption meters and insulation performance trackers. What started as "is this thing working?" turned into a data collection system handling thousands of readings a day.
The data showed patterns I hadn't expected. Storage efficiency varied with ambient temperature, humidity, time of day and charging patterns. The sand behaved differently depending on conditions that simple engineering calculations wouldn't predict, and the only way to understand it was to watch it over time with good data.
After that, I treated the monitoring system as being as important as the storage system, and I've approached every project since the same way.
What I didn't know at the time
This balcony experiment would lead to USPTO Patent No. 12-130086-B1, approved on October 29, 2024. It took two years to go from the first prototype to a granted US patent.
The technology then split into two paths. One was the original sand battery for heat storage, which I cover in our technical deep-dive. The other was the I.C.E. Battery for cold energy storage, a "contingency plan-Z" that became its own venture and was accepted into NUS Enterprise BLOCK71 at Singapore Science Park in June 2025.
Data before everything
The experiment taught me something that applies well beyond energy storage: you cannot optimise what you don't measure, and you cannot measure what you haven't structured.
Before it, I would have approached a client's IoT project by picking sensors, choosing a platform and building dashboards. Now I start by asking what data the client will collect, how they will structure it, and what decisions it will inform.
I later formalised that change, from building the thing to understanding it first, as Data-First Principle Thinking. It's the framework behind our workshop for Shopee's operational leaders, our digital transformation consulting, and every IoT deployment we've done since.