About TimberWatch
Here are some questions people tend to ask us.
- I obviously understand what you do, but I don't know how to explain it to my five year old. Can you help me out?
- Wood is fussy about weather, even indoors. We make a little box that sits near the wood, notices when the air around it has been bad for too long, and tells someone before the wood is wrecked.
- Could you describe it again, but with more filler language, so you sound marketable?
- TimberWatch is a hardware company. We build the TimberWatcher, a modular sensor unit that monitors the environmental conditions timber is stored, transported and installed in. It tracks relative humidity, temperature, timber moisture content, dew point and condensation risk, airflow and movement, and notifies you when the timber has been at sustained risk rather than when a reading briefly blips.
- Is it available to buy?
- Not yet. We are running a pilot with timber importers, floor installers, and a handful of households with timber floors, partly to test the hardware and partly to gather data on how timber actually behaves over time. If you want a unit, that is the way in at the moment.
- What do I get out of being in the pilot?
- Hardware to put where your timber lives, the readings it takes, and direct access to the two people who built it. What we are after is data and honest feedback, including (especially) the unflattering kind.
- Does this make my timber cheaper to insure?
- That is where we think this ends up, and it is part of why we are gathering data. We are not going to claim it today on the basis of a pilot. What we can say now is that a continuous record of the conditions makes a damage claim a log file rather than an argument.
The two of us (again)
Charles Aquilina
Software Engineer
Charles is a software engineer, specialising in all things data. Before tech, he worked in the Australian timber industry for a decade as a timber floor installer, floorsander and salesperson. He now runs Backbone Engineering, where he and the team build business critical software for scaling Australian importer/distributors. He previously worked at Sydney-based startup Chirp, where he architected AI-native applications to reliably serve tens of thousands of users internationally. At TimberWatch he leads the Software side of development: what the units record, how, what it means, and when it's worth waking someone up.
Victor is a very serious electrical engineer, specialising in electronics. His early career was at Umps, where he designed safety-critical hardware for personal alarm and health monitoring devices, along with the software tools behind them. At TimberWatch he handles serious matters, like the TimberWatcher sensor package, PCB design, and embedded firmware. He does not waste time with unserious matters, like writing his own bio.
Elsewhere
TimberWatch is the hardware company. The consulting and client software work we used to do under this name now runs through Backbone Engineering. Charles writes about the rest of it on his own site.