Protecting Your Warehouse from a Meltdown
Many businesses that need to keep a large array of merchandise on hand maintain and operate immense warehouses with significant infrastructure requirements. For many of these warehouses, refrigeration is an essential function to keep produce and other fragile products fresh. With advanced refrigeration technology these devices now have a great deal of complex operability—some can maintain temperature to a tenth of a degree, allowing storage of much more delicate products, and many are now networked to enable remote management and monitoring.
While this new functionality brings convenience and efficiency to users, it also increases the possibility of a surge event damaging large amounts of merchandise. Surge events have historically dealt damage to any device connected to the electrical grid, but the relative isolation of refrigeration equipment on the network had protected it from surges affecting other parts of a warehouse. As the use of network-enabled refrigeration equipment grows, so does the likelihood of surge damage being transferred from other devices to this essential infrastructure.
Surge damage to refrigeration equipment can take a number of different forms, none of them good. Though the refrigeration capability may still be present, remote control of the device or internal temperature monitoring might no longer be functional, resulting in damage to refrigerated merchandise as temperatures fluctuate without operator knowledge. In the event of a more powerful surge, the entire device could be badly damaged or even destroyed entirely, necessitating its replacement and possibly the replacement of all of the goods it contained.
Power surges can come from within a facility as well as from outside, so it is essential to protect each individual device, especially connected devices like smart refrigeration. Electrical equipment can generate power surges that then transfer to other devices on the same network, which causes damage similar to a surge caused by a lightning strike or other external electrical fluctuation. Surge protection devices should be installed at refrigeration equipment itself as well as at any cables that run between the inside and outside of a facility.
To protect temperature-sensitive goods and equipment, it is essential to keep refrigeration equipment functional. To that end, installing surge protection devices throughout a warehouse and on refrigeration equipment can help you prevent a costly meltdown.
