Clipboard, pen and a cold walk at six and six
The shift starts with the temperature round. Chamber one, chamber two, the chilled dock, the freezer, the blast freezer. The operative reads each display and writes it down, initials the sheet and moves on. The same again at the end of the shift.
Between rounds, nobody knows. If a door is left open for an hour at lunchtime, or an evaporator ices up overnight, the sheet shows a normal reading at six and another at six. When a customer asks what happened to their stock on Tuesday afternoon, there is nothing to show them.
The sheets are filed by month. Finding a particular day's reading means pulling out the folder.
Why the manual round survives
It is simple, it satisfies the procedure, and the refrigeration controller that could provide continuous data was installed by an engineer years ago and nobody knows how to get the data out.
- Controllers log data internally but it is not accessible to the office.
- Stand-alone data loggers are downloaded occasionally, if at all.
- Procedures were written around the manual round.
- Alarms exist on the controller but only sound locally.
- Nobody owns the question of continuous monitoring.
What twice-a-day readings cost
You cannot show what happened between readings, which weakens your position in any stock query. Problems that develop slowly are caught late. Staff time on the round, in the cold, adds up across shifts. And paper records are hard to search when a customer or auditor asks.
How we set up continuous chamber logging
- We look at what you have first: many refrigeration controllers can share data over a network, and we connect to them where the manufacturer allows.
- Where they cannot, we fit wireless temperature sensors designed for cold stores in each chamber, placed where your quality team specifies.
- Readings are recorded at short intervals and stored in one place, per chamber, with door sensors if you want them.
- Deviations outside the ranges your quality team sets are alerted to the on-call person, with escalation if unacknowledged.
- The daily log is produced automatically in the format your procedures and customers expect, with any deviation and the action taken noted against it.
- If your procedures require a manual check, it continues as a quick confirmation on a phone that the sensor agrees with the display, recorded against the log.
| Record | Manual round | Continuous logging |
|---|---|---|
| Readings | Twice a day | Every few minutes |
| Deviations between rounds | Not seen | Alerted |
| Log sheet | Handwritten, filed | Produced automatically |
| Customer query on a day | Search the folder | Chart for that chamber and day |
Sensor placement, ranges and whether the manual check stays are decisions for your quality team and procedures. We build to their requirements.
What the store has after
A continuous record for every chamber, charts that answer customer questions in seconds, and alerts about problems as they happen rather than at the next round. The round, if it stays, takes minutes.
Engineers also get better information: a chamber that slowly drifts during defrost cycles shows up in the data long before it becomes a breakdown.
Still doing the temperature round?
- Chamber temperatures are written on paper at set times.
- You cannot show what happened between readings.
- Controller alarms only sound on site.
- Data loggers are rarely downloaded.
- Finding a past reading means pulling out a folder.