For all types of freezers and liquid nitrogen tanks, rising temperatures mean that frozen specimens are at risk. Even if temperatures stay below -50°C, degradation of certain samples can occur. Not only facilities staff, but individual researchers may want to be notified if their research specimens are in jeopardy so that they can move them to another freezer. A typical temperature alert is below.

Besides knowing about individual freezer problems, your facilities staff also needs to know if communications with sensors have been lost, as it indicates a network or communications problem that could affect multiple cold storage devices.

For incubators, it is important to monitor both temperature and humidity to ensure a proper growing environment. When readings are outside ideal conditions, facilities staff and researchers need to be notified so that repairs or adjustments can be made.

Alerts can also be set up to monitor other Coris controller or sensor status, or even external factors (weather, price of electricity, demand response signals from utility, etc.).

To maximize the effectiveness of alert messages, they can be sent out in multiple formats: emails, text messages, phone calls, and via pager networks. Critical alerts can be escalated until someone takes responsibility for the alert, eliminating the tragedy where several people are notified of a problem, but all figure someone else will take care of it.

Each sensor has  a unique ID number, but should be given a meaningful name to help identify it. A description can also be give to further identify the sensor (e.g. “LN2 tank 43 in Boston” and “Dr. Smith virus lab”), and then the sensors can be organized within folders.

Similar to creating file folders on a computer, Coris sensors can be organized into folders by any category – lab names, floor numbers, department names, building names, city, etc.  There is no limit to the number of folders and subfolders you can use—allowing sophisticated organization of large numbers of sensors.