Continuous temperature and humidity monitoring for storage and transit. Calibrated, audit-ready, and specified against what you are actually trying to prove rather than what carries the best margin.
Twenty years of specifying these. Most people are sold one more logger than they need and one fewer sensor than they need — so if you are not certain what you need, ask before you order rather than after.
Everything in this industry is moving towards real-time, and for a lot of shipments that is genuinely better. But a data logger is cheap, well understood, needs no network coverage, and produces a record that has been accepted by inspectors for decades. There are a great many situations where it remains exactly the right tool.
The question is not which technology is newer. It is whether anybody would act on the information while the product is still moving. If the answer is no — and for routine storage monitoring and short, fixed distribution lanes it usually is — then you want a good logger, placed properly, with the calibration paperwork in order.
Where a logger stops being enough. When the value at risk is high, when a mid-journey intervention is genuinely possible, or when finding out three days later means you have already shipped a second batch into the same problem. That is what real-time monitoring is for →
Most confusion in this area comes from treating these as interchangeable. They are not, and the differences show up in an audit rather than on a datasheet.
A sealed logger that travels with the shipment and is read on arrival, often by plugging it in or scanning it to produce a PDF. Cheap enough to treat as packaging, and there is nothing to bring back or re-qualify between uses.
Programmable, downloadable, and returned for the next shipment. Cheaper per journey if they genuinely come back, and considerably more expensive if they do not — which is the risk nobody costs in properly.
Loggers or wireless sensors permanently installed in a cold room, warehouse, fridge, freezer or cabinet, reporting to a system that alarms when something drifts. This is the estate that a mapping study tells you how to lay out.
Higher-accuracy loggers used in numbers for a mapping or qualification exercise, calibrated as a set with certificates that will be appended to the report. Usually hired for the study rather than bought.
You can buy a data logger from anyone. What goes wrong afterwards is nearly always one of these three things.
Accuracy, range, resolution, logging interval and memory, matched to the excursion you are trying to detect. A logger sampling every thirty minutes will miss a twenty-minute door-open event and produce a clean record of a problem you had.
How many, and where. A sensor in the middle of a cold room describes the middle of a cold room. The reading that matters is the worst location, and knowing where that is comes from a mapping study rather than an opinion.
Certificates that are current, traceable, and cover the range you actually use. An out-of-date certificate turns a year of good data into a year of data you cannot rely on, and it is the most common finding we see.
What the file shows, and what to do about it. An excursion is not automatically a rejection; a flat trace is not automatically a pass. We will go through it with you and put our view in writing if you need it for the record.
There is no correct number that can be given without seeing the room, and anyone who quotes you one over the phone is guessing. It depends on volume, layout, airflow, door traffic and where the study found the hot and cold spots. A small pharmacy fridge might need one or two; a large warehouse can need dozens.
The honest sequence is: map it, then place sensors at the extremes the map found, then monitor. Placing sensors first and mapping later means discovering that a year of data came from the most comfortable spot in the building.
Annually is the common answer and is a reasonable default, but the requirement is driven by your own quality system and by the manufacturer's drift specification rather than by convention. What matters more in practice is that somebody owns the schedule. Most recalibration failures we see are administrative, not technical.
No, deliberately. We specify against the requirement and tell you what we would use, which sometimes means a cheaper logger than you expected. The range is small on purpose — a short list we know well and can support properly beats a catalogue nobody has ever used in anger. What we do stock is on the Butopia shop, with prices on the page.
Yes — supply, calibration, recalibration scheduling and the certificate paperwork. For most customers that is the point of using us rather than buying online: the device is a commodity and the traceable paperwork is not.
Usually, and it is worth a conversation before you buy anything. Most findings in this area are about placement, calibration currency or the absence of a documented rationale rather than about the equipment. Replacing the loggers fixes none of those, and we would rather tell you that at the start.
No form to fill in first. An email or a phone call, and a straight answer.
