Compressor failure in a cold-storage room at 02:13 on a Sunday

Cold-storage room with 18 tonnes of cut meat product, stored at 2 °C on Friday afternoon for Monday morning delivery. The installation has a single compressor with no redundancy.

Sunday, 02:13. The compressor goes into electrical fault. The room starts warming. After 60-90 minutes temperature crosses 4 °C and the product enters the zone where cold chain is broken — HACCP implications and automatic rejection by the customer the next day.

This kind of product is guaranteed under strict HACCP criteria: if it exceeds 4 °C for more than 2 hours, the whole lot is lost on compliance.

Aviot monitors interior temperature with a high-precision PT100 industrial probe plus the compressor panel contacts. Customer configuration:

• Pre-warn at 3.0 °C — calls the on-call maintenance technician.
• Critical alarm at 3.5 °C — escalates in parallel to quality lead and manager.
• Instant alert if the compressor contacts report a fault, even before temperature rises.

At 02:13:40 Aviot picked up the compressor contact change. Call to the on-call tech at 02:14. The tech lives close and was on-site at 02:42.

Diagnosis: contactor failure on the compressor. On-site repair: 1 h 20 min. But meanwhile, a key call: at 02:50, with temperature at 3.4 °C, the tech rang the manager and they decided to move critical product to a second on-site room that had spare capacity.

Product was reorganized between 02:55 and 03:40. By the time the failed room crossed 4 °C (at 04:10), it only held secondary inventory the customer didn't require at strict 2 °C.

Zero rejections on Monday. Product delivered to the main customer in normal condition. Actual loss: €0. Incident cost: one night of overtime for the tech (~€250) plus the contactor (~€80).

Aviot's history, exported as CSV, became part of the HACCP incident report and was kept for inspection. Traceability proved cold chain stayed inside the legal range at all times for the delivered product.