The short answer
Without monitoring, a fridge, freezer or cold room that fails after hours is usually found the next morning — with the stock already lost. 24/7 temperature monitoring sends an alert to a control centre as soon as a reading crosses the limit you set, so a person can act within minutes: call your engineer or on-call manager, send someone to move stock, and keep a record of what happened and when.
What is at stake
Food businesses have to keep chilled and frozen food at safe temperatures, and stock that has been out of range for too long may have to be thrown away. Pharmaceutical, vaccine and laboratory storage often has tighter limits still. The cost of one lost night is usually far more than the cost of watching it.
How it works
- Sensors in each fridge, freezer or room report temperature (and humidity where it matters) continuously.
- Thresholds are agreed for each unit, with a short delay so a door opened for a delivery does not raise an alarm.
- An alert reaches the control centre when a reading stays out of range, or when a sensor goes silent — a power cut can take the fridge and the sensor down together.
- An operator acts on the arrangements you agreed: your engineer, your on-call manager, a response officer to attend.
- Everything is logged, which also helps with due-diligence records.
Set up before it happens
- Who has authority to call out a refrigeration engineer at night, and to what cost?
- Where can stock be moved to, and who can let someone in?
- At what point should stock be written off, and who decides?
Those are decisions to make once, in daylight — not for an operator to guess at in the middle of the night.
Talk it through with us
Every site is different. Tell us about yours and we will tell you plainly what we would do.