Cold storage, explained with real data.
Articles about keeping walk-in coolers, freezers and reefers at the right temperature. Written from real sensor readings and real questions from the people who run them.
We publish the data behind every article, so you can check our claims yourself.
Last updated 3 September 2026 · Author: Vimal Bhaya
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Why temperature alarms cry wolf, and how to stop it.
Every alarm threshold an operator might pick, replayed against 5,179 real readings from a freezer that failed. There is no setting that gives you both a quiet week and useful warning.
Threshold vs rate-of-change alerting.
The steepest hour in our whole record was a freezer working perfectly. The real emergency crept up at less than a degree an hour. Why the slope, not the reading, tells you which one you have.
Glycol buffers, and why air temperature lies.
Your groceries survive the drive home because food changes temperature slowly. Air does not. What a sealed bottle of antifreeze around the probe actually fixes, and when it is the wrong choice.
Alerting more than one person.
A 3am alert to one sleeping phone is the same as no alert. How escalation from email to SMS to a ringing phone works, why it is set per freezer, and what to ask any vendor before you sign.
What a good alert looks like at 3am.
Six things an alert has to say before it is worth waking somebody. Built from a real Sunday morning alert that bought two working days of runway over a holiday weekend.
The Philadelphia freezer that failed in April 2025.
The incident the alarm article is built from. A failed defrost timer, $150,000 of frozen stock, and the full temperature record with the raw readings attached.