Case studies

A busy kitchen runs six or seven separate cold units, each opened hundreds of times a shift. Compressors fail quietly, usually on a Sunday night, when the building is empty. By the time someone opens the walk-in on Monday, the entire week's stock is already gone, and there is no record of when it went wrong.

One probe per cold unit, a single gateway in the back office. Thresholds are set per unit, so the dessert fridge and the chest freezer are judged by their own limits. Alerts go to the head chef first and escalate to the owner if nobody acknowledges them.

Units covered: Walk-in chiller, prep fridges, under-counter units, chest freezer

Cold storage in a lab holds material that often cannot be replaced at any price: patient samples, cell lines, reference standards, long-running study material. An excursion is not just a loss; it has to be documented precisely, with its magnitude and duration, before anyone can decide whether the stored material is still valid.

Probes are placed in a buffered medium rather than open air, so routine door openings do not trigger false alarms while genuine drift still shows. Every reading is timestamped and retained, and out-of-hours alerts follow a named escalation chain rather than a single phone.

Units covered: Reagent fridges, sample freezers, ultra-low freezers, incubators

A large cold store is not one temperature; it is a map of them. Warm spots form near doors, near lights, and at the top of high racking. Loading bays are the weakest link: a dock door held open through a long load lets a pallet face warm well before anything in the room average looks wrong.

Sensors are placed at the warmest and coldest points identified during temperature mapping, not simply in the middle of the room. Each zone carries its own thresholds, and alarms use a dwell time so a normal defrost cycle does not cry wolf while a real drift still triggers.

Units covered: Multi-zone cold stores, blast freezers, loading docks, staging areas

Open multideck cabinets sit on the shop floor, exposed to warm air, blocked airflow, and over-stacking above the load line. Failures are spread across a whole estate with nobody permanently watching any one case, so the first sign of trouble is usually a customer complaint or a shelf being cleared at 9am.

A sensor in each cabinet and cold room, grouped by store. Store managers see their own site; area managers see the estate on one screen, sorted by severity so the worst case gets the engineer first.

Units covered: Open display cases, deli and butchery counters, back-of-house cold rooms