Buildings · Frontier
WallWater: In-Wall Moisture & Leak Radar
Finds water leaking inside walls and ceilings weeks before stains appear.
Plausible physics, early work — shown honestly as an experiment.
How it works
WiFi waves slow down and weaken dramatically when they cross water — far more than when crossing dry drywall. A damp patch inside a wall therefore bends the signals in one fixed spot, and keeps doing so. The system notices that persistent change and marks the spot on the floorplan.
In the physics: Water's permittivity (eps_r~80) vs drywall (~2) is a 40x dielectric contrast: a wet patch slows and attenuates every multipath component crossing it, producing a persistent, spatially-consistent delay increase (fractions of ns) and amplitude drop on specific CIR taps — a static signature no motion sensor can see.
See it work
This is real pipeline output for Buildings, replayed. The exact reading depends on your room.
Go deeper
How the field becomes an answer
How we prove it
Own-hardware: controlled wet-sponge / drip-tray inserted in a stud-wall cavity between ESP32 links, dose-response of CIR tap delay vs gravimetric water content; ESP32-wall dataset as the dry-wall propagation baseline.
Who it is for
For the facilities director / property insurer: 'Your WiFi becomes a building-wide leak detector — catch the $50k mold claim while it's still a $500 plumbing fix.'
runtime Runs today in LatentField 2.0 as through_wall_presence
The matching solution
Complete first-room estimateFloor Utilization Node3 nodes · ~$130 parts · 90 min Request kit, subscribe, or set up →Compatible DIY hardware options
120 min · advanced
240 min · installer