In November 2022, I set up a thermal energy storage experiment on the balcony of my Saigon apartment. A cylindrical container filled with sand, heated to over 300°C by resistive elements, monitored by a handful of temperature sensors I'd wired up myself.
It was supposed to be a weekend project. It became the foundation of everything Alpha Bits does in IoT today.
Looking back, this experiment was the purest expression of what I now call Data-First Principle Thinking — the mindset that eventually led us into digital transformation consulting, data mining, and AI workflow automation. In 2022, I didn't have a name for it yet. I just had sand, sensors, and questions.
The Experiment
The concept was simple: convert electricity into heat, store that heat in sand, and measure how long it lasted. The conversion efficiency turned out to be 98% — almost all the electrical energy became thermal energy. The interesting part wasn't the number itself, but what happened when I started actually monitoring the system.
I deployed temperature sensors at various depths within the sand, ambient condition monitors, energy consumption meters, and insulation performance trackers. What started as "is this thing working?" became a genuine data collection system processing thousands of readings daily.
The data showed patterns I hadn't expected. Storage efficiency varied depending on ambient temperature, humidity, time of day, and charging patterns. The sand didn't just "hold heat" — it behaved differently based on conditions that simple engineering calculations wouldn't predict. You needed to watch it, over time, with good data, to understand what was actually happening.
That insight — that the monitoring system was as important as the storage system itself — changed how I thought about every project afterwards.
What I Didn't Know at the Time
This balcony experiment would lead to USPTO Patent No. 12-130086-B1 — approved October 29, 2024, two years from first prototype to granted US patent.
The technology split into two paths: the original sand battery for heat storage (covered in our technical deep-dive), and the I.C.E. Battery for cold energy storage — a "contingency plan-Z" that became its own venture, accepted into NUS Enterprise BLOCK71 at Singapore Science Park in June 2025.
The Real Lesson: Data Before Everything
The thermal battery experiment taught me something that applies far beyond energy storage: you cannot optimise what you don't measure, and you cannot measure what you haven't structured.
Before this experiment, I would have approached a client's IoT project by picking sensors, choosing a platform, and building dashboards. After this experiment, I start with the question: what data will you collect, how will you structure it, and what decisions will it inform?
That shift — from "build the thing" to "understand the thing first" — is what I later formalised 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.
It all started with sand on a balcony and a question I couldn't answer without data.