The most expensive fault in a cold room is the one nobody notices: a compressor that stops at night spoils a warehouse of product by morning. A remote monitoring system connects the temperature and humidity sensors, door contacts and controllers in every room to a data logger; the values are sent to the cloud, viewed on a computer or phone, and an SMS, e-mail or app notification is sent when a limit is exceeded.
Record keeping is becoming a legal requirement: continuous temperature records are demanded in food safety (HACCP) inspections and in pharmaceutical warehouses. An automatic, tamper-proof record in place of hand-kept daily charts both simplifies the inspection and offers proof to the customer. The records also allow energy consumption and defrost frequency to be analysed.
Modern controllers (Dixell, Carel, Danfoss) connect directly to monitoring via Modbus or a cloud link; stand-alone sensor boxes are added to older systems. Together with the electronic expansion valve and variable-speed compressor, the monitoring system is part of a whole that reduces energy and product losses. In our cold room projects a monitoring system is offered as an option.