Commercial Refrigeration / Food Service
Food distributors, restaurants, neighborhood stores, schools, cafeterias, ice cream shops, and wine collectors all have something in common: large, commercial refrigerators and/or freezers are key tools in their operations. And whether you’re in a bustling metropolis or rural setting, keeping things cool can be a challenge. Thunderstorms, ice storms, heat waves, and their associated brown-outs and power outages can cause power loss and cooling without notice. And then there’s the occasional power loss when someone accidentally hits a switch or trips a breaker.
Temperature@lert’s WiFi and Cellular Edition are used in thousands of installations to help prevent damage when such incidents occur. Monitoring each chilled space with a temperature sensor set to send an alert when the temperature rises too high can provide the valuable time to take action. And if power is completely lost, Temperature@lert’s Sensor Cloud Service can be set to let you know the device has not checked in, alerting you to potential problems before they occur.
With monitoring intervals as little as 1 minute, you’ll know when there’s a problem without unnecessary delays, leaving you more time to resolve any potential problems. And temperature logs can be used for regulatory reporting, saving time and money compared to manual temperature recording.
Avoiding Hors D’oeuvres Disaster
In the NYC area, lightning storms and other problems knock out the power several times a year. This causes business owners in the food industry to panic since disruptions in freezer or refrigerator temperatures during storage can cause major losses of precious inventory and time. During these power outages, owners and employees often must stay at work late, or return to work late at night, to check and care for their supplies. Enter Temperature@lert's Cellular Edition.
Cindy Marshall is the owner of Cindy Sue Products, a wholesale distributor of gourmet hors d’oeuvres in New Rochelle, NY. Servicing Westchester, Manhattan, and lower Connecticut, Cindy Sue Products offers the widest selection of hors d’oeuvres in the metropolitan NYC area. Cindy needed an easy-to-use mobile temperature sensor that didn’t rely on traditional computer networks, and she found just that in the Temperature@lert Cellular Edition. Now during power outages, Cindy monitors the state of her inventory from her phone while she’s in her delivery van taking care of customers or at home.
Cindy Marshall, Owner
“We recently had to expand our refrigeration to an offsite location. Because we wanted to be sure the refrigeration unit was operating reliably but could not easily connect to a computer network or monitoring system, we looked for a cost-effective solution to keep tabs on our products. After a lot of research, we discovered Temperature@lert’s Cellular Edition. Not only did it fit our needs perfectly but it was simple to set up. I plugged the unit in and it worked! I set my unit to report in every 15 minutes. If I want, I can log onto the Temperature@lert server from anywhere at any time to check the temperature history and alert status.”
“This is a real time saver. If there is a problem, now instead of having to drive out to see if everything is OK, I can view what’s happening from home or on my Blackberry. I tell all my customers what a great product the Temperature@lert sensor is.”
Temperature@lert Cellular Edition
I’d Like My Hamburger Cold Please
Opening a restaurant each morning brings all kinds of surprises. One fretful morning, the prep crew of Pipeline Restaurant Inc’s Burger Shack walked right into a disaster - the large walk-in refrigerator charged with keeping the cool side cool quit working during the night. Thousands of dollars of inventory had to be thrown out. Worse yet, while waiting for new inventory to arrive, customers had to be turned away.
Pipeline Restaurant turned to Temperature@lert for help and placed our cellular temperature monitors on critical walk-in refrigerators and freezers at their Burger Shack and Caliente Mexican Grill locations in Rhode Island. Each cellular temperature monitor transmits the current interior temperature of the walk-ins back to the 24/7 Climatenet monitoring system. The moment any walk-in refrigerator gets too warm, Pipeline Restaurant Inc.‘s management team is alerted via telephone and email to take action.
Ben Wood, CEO
“Walk-in refrigerators fail more often than you’d think. With Temperature@lert, we can correct the problem before it adversely impacts our business. Anyone who has ever experienced a refrigeration failure will agree that this is a no-brainer purchase. Plus, the system took less than a minute to setup. You just plug it into AC power and it begins monitoring the temperature wirelessly - we didn’t even need to run a phone line or setup internet access for the devices. We then used the Climatenet website to configure our alerts to be sent to myself and our HVAC/R repair shop. Now, the problem is fixed before it impacts our business. I love these little devices!”
Temperature@lert Cellular Edition
The Perfect Glass of Wine
How do you cool nearly half a million cubic feet in the desert? Some people thought it was impossible - but not John Samora of Paso Fino wines in Phoenix, AZ. John built a commercial wine cellar that serves as home to over $1,000,000.00 of wine. To keep things cool in the desert, John installed two custom chillers to maintain the proper temperature and then “insulated the hell out of the building.”
Last July, John received a jolt from the local electric company. “Things were running well, but then we received an abnormally large electric bill.” As it turns out, one of the chillers had failed. The other one was working overtime to keep up - and as a result, consuming much more electricity. “We had been running on one chiller for nearly a month before we knew about the problem. Had the second one also malfunctioned, it could have damaged tens of thousands of dollars worth of wine.”
John installed three Temperature@lert cellular temperature monitors in his facility: one on each chiller’s coolant line and one for the ambient air temperature. During normal operation, the temperature of each chiller goes up and down as each unit cycles on and off. If that EKG-like graph of the cycle goes flat for either chiller, that means it’s stopped working. The Temperature@lert flat line detection alerts John the moment either chiller stops cycling.
John Samora, CEO
“We were originally told that cooling an area this size in the desert couldn't be done. But those are magic words to an entrepreneur. The gauntlet had been thrown down. I knew with the right design, we could make it work. Now, we maintain the building at a constant 65F and can get down to 35F very easily if needed. We use the Temperature@lert cellular with flatline detection for the two coolant line temperature probes so we’ll know the instant one of the systems quits working. Now, we know if there’s a problem with our cooling system long before we receive a large electric bill or worse: lose the second chiller!”
Temperature@lert Cellular Edition