NRM Success Story
Life Technologies
Multiple Locations Across USA
Life Technologies not only greatly improved the efficiency of their refrigeration system, but they also gained new capabilities to better manage its operation. NRM provided a full-service solution they now can't live without.
What They Needed
Life Technologies, a biotech/pharmaceutical company that is now a part of the Thermo Fisher Scientific family, was looking for a monitoring system that was more comprehensive than what they currently had.
In each of their facilities—Carlsbad, CA, Austin, TX, and Frederick, MD—they’d already installed simple temperature monitoring due to the sensitive nature and cost of the products they stored. For the most part, this protected their valuable assets.
This also, however, did not prevent the loss of a compressor unit in one of their coolers because the temperatures were still maintained due to the redundant cooling systems. They had never received any indication that there was a growing issue within the equipment itself. Not wanting to absorb the cost of another equipment failure, they sought something better.
WHAT NRM PROVIDED
NRM provided a solution that not only armed their staff with a plethora of monitoring info they didn’t know was available to them, but one that also drastically reduced the amount of energy used by their large portfolio of coolers and freezers.
It began with implementing our Remote Site Manager platform, the most comprehensive controls and monitoring tool on the market. The RSM platform provides live 24-hour access to temperatures and settings, equipment runtimes, on-demand defrost options, mobile alerts, and automatic logging of historical performance. They use the system daily, and it has dramatically decreased the amount of time spent each day manually checking and recording temperatures.
On top of the monitoring platform, NRM’s solution also had a not-insignificant impact on their energy costs. By instituting an adaptive cooling schedule, which included a lead/lag relationship between redundant systems, the average “on” time for their cooling equipment went from 100% of the time to around 40% without degrading the cooler or freezer’s ability to satisfy temperature requirements.
Between the three facilities, 24 cold environments were optimized for their most efficient operation, and as a result, Life Technologies sees annual combined monetary savings around $175,000.
Industry
Biotech
Location
Multiple Facilities Across USA
Cold Rooms
- 15 Walk-in Coolers
- 7 Walk-in Freezers
- 2 Cold Labs
Implemented Measures
- CoolTrol refrigeration controls
- Remote Site Manager
- High-Efficiency EC Motors
- Anti-Sweat Door Heater Controls
Annual Energy Savings
1,500,000 kWh
Annual Dollar Savings
$175,000
"I utilize the monitoring dashboard every single day. Because of the types of pharmaceutical compounds we store, we have redundant cooling systems in our coolers and freezers. So, if we didn’t have RSM monitoring the equipment itself, we wouldn’t know if there’s an issue because the space temperatures requirements would still be satisfied. RSM allows me to catch mechanical issues early, before we have a $30 million mistake."
— Shawn, EH&S
Avoid food safety crises with a wealth of operational data and proactive insights
Whether you have 1 cold space in a single school kitchen, or 100 cold spaces spread across an entire district, our live summary page gives you an immediate overview of all your cooling activity.
Quickly consult current and 7-day runtimes, cooling status, temperature settings, and address any alarms that have been triggered.
Consider the amount of time and effort you’d save by having critical operational info all conveniently in one place.
Arm yourself with powerful and unique visual diagnostics graphs to pinpoint exactly when and where an operating issue arises. Troubleshooting becomes more efficient and effective, helping to ensure the issue is resolved on the first technician visit.
The graphs show important but often overlooked components such as amperages, compressor cycles, the solenoid valve, and things like whether a door is open or not.
The monitoring platform offers transparent runtime and temperature data that provide the measurement and verification proof for accurate recordkeeping.
These graphs also allow you to actually see how much less energy your refrigeration system is using. While also tracking that safe temperatures are always met.
Store up to 10 years of operational logs that take the human-error component out of tracking temperatures.
Going beyond a high temperature alert — which occurs only after an issue has already disrupted operations — NRM’s platform provides a suite of early detection notifications to help you be more proactive with troubleshooting.
For example, a compressor that’s short cycling will still likely be able to cool the space, but it’s dangerous, unnoticed overuse could lead to a critical system failure, jeopardizing the entire cooler’s worth of food.