In a previous life, I worked in the building maintenance department at a small university on the west coast.  My job was basically to take all the calls from across the campus when stuff went wrong, and then send someone to fix the problem.

One of the frequent calls I received had to do with the walk-in coolers and freezers in the main dining hall.  It seemed like those things were always going down, and the dining hall had hundreds of hungry college students to serve three times a day — this was a major problem!

With no equipment set up to monitor the temperature and humidity in the coolers, the detection of a problem was left in the hands of the already busy kitchen staff.  By the time the problem was reported and we were able to make a service call, there was a real possibility of major food loss and substantial cost to the university.  If there had been a monitoring system, like the Ravica BitSight2, with a couple of temperature and humidity sensors installed, we would have been able to set the high and low temperature thresholds,  received notifications via email or SMS, and fixed any problem before it reached a critical state.  That would have saved time, money, and lowered the collective blood pressure of both the kitchen and maintenance staff.

There are lots of other situations where Ravica environmental sensors would have been useful for facility management, but I’ll save those stories for another blog.

~Jessica

Today, I would like to share another customer experience from the point of view of a restaurant that needed a solution, fast. This restaurant, we’ll call it Larry’s Lobster Shack (we’re in Maine, we love lobster), had a major disaster; their walk-in cooler died. Yes, that’s the big walk-in refrigerator that stored all of their perishable goods. The pertinent issue here was that the refrigerator died just after closing time, so what happened? That’s right, the temperature continually rose all night long. So when Larry came in to open The Lobster Shack the next day, he immediately noticed the problem and called a repair man. Unfortunately, the necessary part to fix the compressor was going to take a day to get in. That means Larry was going to have to discard all of the food in his walk-in cooler. By the time everything was back up and running, the temperature had risen too much.

That’s when Larry called Ravica looking for help. He couldn’t take the chance that this would happen again. If he had known as soon as the cooler’s temperature had gone out of its normal operating range, he could have acted sooner and possible saved his stock of food. Larry didn’t only lose all of the food in his cooler, but he couldn’t open The Lobster Shack that day with no food to serve. Well, the lobsters were still alive in their tank, but it hardly seemed right to serve them with nothing else, and as the only option for customers.

The thermostat of the walk-in refrigerator at Larry’s Lobster Shack is set to 38 degrees Fahrenheit with a 3 degree differential. That means when the temp rises to 41 degrees, the thermostat closes and the compressor and condenser fan comes on. When the temp falls to 35 degrees, the reverse happens.

To set Larry up with temperature monitoring for his cooler, all he needed was a BitSight2 and a single port temperature and humidity SensorRemote (he figured when it comes to food storage, he should be aware of the moister in the cooler as well). He mounted the BitSight2 outside the cooler, then ran some cabling inside the cooler and mounted the sensor there. The process was easy enough that Larry did it himself.

From there Larry was able to configure his BitSight2 with the appropriate temperature and humidity thresholds. Now, if the temp rises to 42 degrees (remember, that is outside the cooler’s normal operating range, so the compressor and condenser fans should have turned on) and stays there for more than 20 minutes, then Larry gets a text message and an email.

Larry has since opened two new locations in different parts of the state. In each location he installed another environmental monitoring system. He even added a security sensor to the door of his walk-in coolers, so that he gets an alert if one of the employees leaves the door open for more than 5 minutes.

So you can see that the Ravica line of temperature and humidity monitoring systems are about more than just monitoring data centers. There are many industries that can take advantage of our systems. I think next time I might share a story about a customer of mine that uses the SecurityProbe-x60 in his metal fabrication plant to monitor his HVAC system.

-Jon Mills
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