Cold room and refrigerated transport temperature monitoring

The expensive failure in a cold chain is almost never the one somebody was watching. It is a compressor that stops at two in the morning, a door left open on a Friday, or a probe that quietly died three weeks before anyone looked at the chart. Genesis reads the probes already fitted to your rooms and vehicles, keeps taking readings when the network is gone, and raises the alarm on a phone rather than in a report.

Who puts these on a cold chain

The hardware is the same in all four cases. What changes is how long the record has to survive and who has to be able to read it.

Cold storage and food operations

Chillers, freezers, blast rooms and ripening rooms, monitored today by whoever walks past the gauge. The failure that costs real money happens overnight, and the cheapest fix is a threshold alarm on a phone rather than a better chart.

Pharma and clinical storage

Product held under temperature control needs a continuous record, not a spot check. What matters most is that the record has no holes in it when someone asks for it a year later, which is a question about buffering and timekeeping rather than about dashboards.

Refrigerated transport and 3PL

Assets move, coverage comes and goes, and the trailer that dropped out of the network for six hours is exactly the one an auditor asks about. Readings taken on a schedule and sent when there is signal are worth more than live telemetry that stops at the depot gate.

Refrigeration equipment builders

You manufacture commercial refrigeration, and your distributors and accounts now expect the units to report. A controller that fits inside the equipment and reports into a cloud carrying your name is a shorter route than standing up a firmware and cloud team.

What a Genesis reads in a cold chain

Temperature is the headline and rarely the whole story. Door state, plant behaviour and power events are what explain an excursion after the fact, and they sit on the same four ports and the same timeline. Four ports on the Genesis industrial IoT controller, one on Genesis Lite where a location has a single point worth measuring.

Temperature probes

RS485, digital and 1-Wire probes on rooms, product cores, evaporator returns and glycol lines. The probe goes into the cold space and the controller stays outside it, which is what keeps the electronics and the battery inside their rated range.

Humidity

SHT30-class and industrial humidity transducers for stores where relative humidity affects shelf life or product integrity as much as temperature does.

Door state

A reed or magnetic switch on a digital input. Door-open duration explains most short excursions, and having it on the same timeline as the temperature turns an alarm into an answer.

Refrigeration plant

Compressor current and run state over RS485 Modbus or a digital input, plus suction and discharge pressure through analogue transducers. A run pattern that changes before the room does is the earliest warning available.

Power and mains status

Mains presence, generator run state and battery voltage on digital and analogue inputs. In cold storage the loss that hurts starts as a power event, not a temperature one.

Position, where the asset moves

The expansion slot takes an external GPS module, so a trailer or container reports where it was as well as how cold it was. Cellular is built in, so there is no gateway to install in a vehicle.

What the record has to survive

In cold chain the record matters as much as the alert, because the record is what gets asked for months later. These are the parts of OmniCloud that carry that weight.

A record with no gaps in it

Readings are taken on the interval you set whether or not there is signal. They are written to local storage with the time from the on-board clock, then backfilled in order on the next successful transmit, so an outage leaves a delay rather than a hole.

Excursion alerts with acknowledgement

Minimum and maximum per sensor, with push notification and email to the people on the list. Acknowledgement is recorded against the alarm, so a shift handover shows what was already seen and what was not.

One room per sensor, not per box

Location is bound to the sensor rather than the controller, so one unit covering a chiller and a freezer keeps the two rooms apart in every chart, alarm and export. The location is stamped on each reading when it is written and never rewritten afterwards.

Exports auditors can open

Full-resolution history exported to XLSX, with numbers that stay numbers so the spreadsheet still calculates. Retention is not capped by a rolling window that quietly drops the month somebody needs.

Fault detection on the probes

A failed probe is more dangerous than a hot room, because it reports something. Genesis checks each port before it samples and publishes a fault code when the check fails, so the alarm you get is that the sensor is gone.

Access across companies

The site owns its hardware and grants visibility to the contractor who maintains the plant, or to the customer whose product is in the room. Device sharing does that without either party buying the hardware twice.

Serving your own customers from the same platform

Cold storage is often sold as a service, which means the people who need to see the temperature are not the people who own the building. OmniCloud is multi-tenant with per-tenant isolation and branding, and device sharing lets a site grant visibility to a customer or a refrigeration contractor without either party buying the hardware twice. Here is how the multi-tenant model works when the account holder is not the site owner.

For what building that data path yourself costs in engineer-months, read our breakdown of AWS IoT Core.

Questions we get from cold-chain operators

Which temperature sensors does Genesis work with?

Any probe that speaks RS485 Modbus RTU, 1-Wire, I2C, SDI-12 or an analogue voltage output, and over fifty sensor types are supported today. Each of the four ports is assigned a protocol from the dashboard, so one unit can carry a Modbus room probe, a 1-Wire product-core probe and a door switch at the same time.

Can the controller sit inside a freezer?

The controller is rated from -20 °C to +70 °C operating, so it is mounted outside the cold space with the probe cable run into it. That is the normal installation in any case: it keeps the battery inside its useful range and it means changing a probe does not mean opening the room.

What happens to the record when the network drops?

Readings continue on the interval you set. They are written to local storage stamped with the time from the on-board real-time clock, which holds through sleep and through the outage, and are backfilled in order on the next successful transmit. A reading taken offline still knows when it happened.

How does this work with traceable calibration?

Traceable calibration belongs to the probe and travels with its certificate from the instrument maker, which is what an auditor asks to see. Genesis reads a certified probe exactly as it is, so the instruments you already have on a calibration schedule stay in service and stay traceable. Tell us which probes you run and we will confirm they connect.

What does the platform give a regulated operation?

The record itself, with the properties a regulated operation is judged on: readings timestamped on the device by its own real-time clock, held without later rewriting, per-user authentication with role-based access, and full-resolution export. Validation is always performed against your specific regime and your specific installation, so bring us the scope you are being held to and we will walk through it with you.

What connectivity works in refrigerated transport?

4G-LTE cellular, built into the controller, so there is no gateway to fit in a vehicle. Coverage on a route is never complete, which is why buffering and on-board timekeeping matter more here than the link itself. An external GPS module goes in the expansion slot when position needs to be on the same record.

How long does it run on a battery in a cold store?

It is set by the two intervals you choose, both configurable from the dashboard after installation, and cold reduces the useful capacity of any cell. For a fixed installation with mains nearby, run it from the 6 to 32 V DC input and treat the battery as ride-through. For a moving asset, tell us the sampling interval you need and we will size it.

Can I run this for several customers under my own brand?

Yes. OmniCloud is multi-tenant with per-tenant isolation and branding, and the mobile app can be published under your own developer identity. Each of your customers sees their own facilities and nobody else's.

Tell us what needs a temperature record

Which rooms or vehicles, which probes are already fitted, how often a reading is needed and how long the history has to be kept. We come back with what a Genesis would read there and how the installation goes in.

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