Temperature Records

Temperature Records

Every fridge, freezer and hot-holding unit you listed in site configuration appears here for recording.

Twice a Day

Each unit is recorded at two points:

• Start — taken as part of your opening checks
• End — taken as part of your closing checks

The two are recorded independently, so the person opening and the person closing do not have to be the same person, and neither has to wait for the other.

What You Record

For each unit you enter the minimum, actual and maximum reading.

• Actual is what the probe or display reads right now.
• Minimum and maximum are the extremes since the unit was last checked, taken from the unit's own display if it tracks them.

The min and max matter more than people expect. A fridge reading 4°C at both ends of the day looks fine, but a maximum of 11°C means it spent part of the day somewhere it should not have been. The actual reading alone would never have shown that.

If your unit does not display min and max, record the actual reading and be consistent about it.

Critical Readings

If a reading is out of range, the unit is flagged critical.

A critical flag does not clear on its own, and it does not clear by taking a normal reading tomorrow. A critical stops the day being counted as complete until it is resolved.

To clear it you record:

1. The action taken — what you actually did. Moved stock to another unit, turned the thermostat down, called the engineer, discarded affected product.
2. A follow-up temperature — the reading after that action.

The follow-up is kept alongside the original, not instead of it. The record shows the problem, the response and the outcome, which is exactly the sequence an inspector is looking for.

Why It Is Built This Way

An out-of-range reading is not a failure. Fridges fail, doors get left open, and a delivery of warm stock raises a unit temporarily. None of that counts against you.

What counts against you is an out-of-range reading with nothing after it. That reads as a problem noticed and ignored — far worse than the problem itself.

The flag is deliberately hard to dismiss for that reason. It is not there to nag; it is there so the record of what you did survives the shift.

Never guess a reading you did not take. A gap is a small problem that is easy to explain. An invented reading that contradicts the unit's own data logger is a much larger one, and it calls every other record you keep into question.