Walk-in cooler & freezer monitoring
Find out when the walk-in fails, not when the delivery does.
A compressor dies on Friday night. Nobody opens the door until Saturday prep, and by then it is not one product that is gone — it is everything on the shelves, plus the day. Setpoint watches the temperature continuously and emails you the moment it crosses the limit you set, while there is still time to move stock.
Read this before you buy
This is not a plug-and-play monitoring service.
Setpoint trades convenience for control and cost. That is the right trade for some kitchens and the wrong one for others, so here is the honest split before you spend anything.
A good fit if…
- Something in the building already stays on overnight — a back-office PC, a POS terminal, a small server.
- You want the records on your own machine, exportable to CSV whenever an inspector asks.
- You are logging a walk-in, a reach-in line and a freezer and do not want to pay per sensor, per month, forever.
- You have been quoted a monitoring contract and want to know what the hardware actually costs.
Buy something else if…
- Nothing in the building stays powered overnight — the hub is what stores history and sends alerts.
- You need a certified instrument for a regulated programme (see below).
- You want somebody else to own the monitoring, respond to alarms and carry the liability. That is a service contract, and this is not one.
- You want it working five minutes out of the box with nothing to set up.
Accuracy, honestly
Precise in the cooler. A failure alarm in the freezer.
The probe is not equally accurate across its whole range, and most listings quietly skip that. Cooler temperatures sit inside its tight band; frozen storage does not.
The ±0.5 °C figure holds from −10 to +85 °C. A walk-in freezer runs below that, where the sensor is specified at ±2 °C — comfortably enough to tell you the door was left open or the compressor died, which is what an alarm is for, but not precise enough to be a calibrated record at a −18 °C threshold. If your programme needs that, you need a per-unit calibrated instrument, and we will tell you so rather than sell you this.
Probe placement
Where you put it decides what it tells you.
A walk-in is an insulated metal box, which is hard on both thermometers and 2.4 GHz radio. Two decisions do most of the work.
Put the probe here
In the return air path at product height, away from the evaporator's direct blast and away from the door. That is the air your stock actually sits in. If you are logging for records, keep it in the same spot every time so today's numbers mean the same thing as last month's.
Not here
Directly under the evaporator, hard against a wall, or in the door draught. The first reads colder than your product, the last two swing every time someone walks in — and a probe that cries wolf at every delivery gets muted, which is worse than no probe at all.
Keep the electronics outside
Mount the unit on the warm side and pass only the stainless probe through the door gasket or an existing conduit. The stainless tip is the only part rated for the cold and the damp; the board and the cell are not, and condensation is what kills them.
Expect the radio to struggle
An insulated metal box attenuates Wi-Fi badly, which is exactly why readings are buffered on the probe when it cannot reach the hub and uploaded when it reconnects. A patchy signal costs you timeliness, not data — but mounting the unit outside the box helps far more than any antenna trick.
What it actually does
Alarm first. Records second. Nothing else.
Threshold alarm
A high and low limit per probe. Cross it and Setpoint emails you or fires a webhook. The check runs on your hub, so it works with nobody logged in and no dashboard open.
Records you own
Every reading lands in a local database on your machine, charted over any date range and exported to CSV or Excel in one click when somebody asks to see the last three months.
Survives the internet
Probe to hub is your own network. Losing the building's internet does not stop logging or local alerting — only outbound email needs a connection to leave the building.
Nothing to cancel
No account, no per-sensor monthly fee, no vendor who can sunset the service or raise the price. The firmware is open and the hub app is free.
Food safety
A logging aid, not a certified instrument.
Continuous electronic temperature logging is accepted and encouraged in food-service practice, and no third-party device certification is mandated for it — the legal duty sits with the operator and the records. Setpoint can support that programme as a temperature-logging aid, and the CSV export exists so those records are yours to hand over.
It is not a validated critical-control device, is not certified to EN 12830 or any equivalent standard, and carries no per-unit accredited calibration certificate. It should never be represented as any of those. For vaccine storage, pharmaceutical or accredited cold-chain work you need per-unit accredited calibration and validated software — this is not that product, and no amount of configuration makes it one.
Evidence
Numbers we measured, not numbers we hoped for.
Three probes, three environments, two days. One unit captured 160,916 readings on a single charge with nothing dropped — and the run also surfaced a duplicate-timestamp bug that has since been fixed. The report says which is which.
FAQ
The questions worth asking.
Will it alert me if the walk-in fails overnight?
Yes. You set a high limit per probe and Setpoint emails or webhooks you when a reading crosses it. The check runs on your own back-office machine, so it fires whether or not anyone has a dashboard open. Email needs the internet to leave the building; a webhook to something on your own network does not.
Can I use this for my HACCP records?
It can support a HACCP programme as a temperature-logging aid — continuous electronic logging is accepted and no third-party device certification is mandated for food service. It is not a validated critical-control device and is not certified to EN 12830 or any equivalent, so do not represent it as one. The legal duty stays with the operator and the records.
How accurate is it at walk-in temperatures?
A cooler at +1 to +4 °C sits inside the probe's tight band, so ±0.5 °C. A walk-in freezer at around −18 °C is below that band, where it is ±2 °C — enough to tell you it has failed, not enough to be a calibrated record at a frozen-storage threshold.
Will Wi-Fi reach inside a walk-in?
Often, but not always — an insulated metal box attenuates 2.4 GHz badly. Setpoint is built for that: readings are buffered on the probe when it cannot reach the hub and uploaded when it reconnects, so a patchy signal costs you timeliness rather than data. Mount the unit outside the box with only the stainless probe passing through the gasket.
How many coolers can one hub watch?
Dozens. Probes self-discover on your network and each carries its own limits, so a walk-in, a prep line and a freezer all report to the one machine you already have. You pay for sensors, not for a gateway.
Does it need a subscription?
No. No account, no subscription, no cloud service. Readings go to a free app you run yourself and live in a local database you can export any time. There is no vendor who can switch it off or raise the price.
What do I need to run it?
Any Windows or Linux machine you already leave running: the back-office PC, a POS terminal that stays on, a mini-PC or a small server. That machine stores the history and sends the alerts. If nothing in the building stays on overnight, Setpoint is not the right pick — and that is a fine answer.
Get started
Start with one probe on the walk-in.
The DIY kit is the board, the waterproof probe, the charger and a USB-C data cable, with a quick-start card and a one-click browser flasher. You solder it and flash it; the hub app is a free download. Prove it on one cooler before you fit out the kitchen.