Humidity loggers revealed unpleasant truths

You can’t handle the truth.

Sometimes I think the reason why people don’t use temperature and humidity loggers is because they may discover the truth, or have what they already suspect confirmed. In a couple of recent discussions we have had, we have discovered how humidity loggers revealed unpleasant truths.

In one case our initial response was to distrust the loggers. So we sent out replacemnent units (both thermocron humidity loggers and logtag humidity loggers) to confirm that the results were real. And they were.

In another case the customer also initially doubted the results but tried doing some things differently, and sure enough, the humidity dropped back within limits.

We have a number of support calls each year where the customer says “the loggers are showing X and this can’t be true”. Personally I like them because they provide a great opportunity to think a bit more laterally. So rather than discredit the results, assume that they are right and then try to work out what could cause them.

Often the answer is reasonably simple – doors left open, fridges over stocked, loggers left out. You get the idea.

But every now and then a real gem comes along. A fridge that is exposed to sunlight at a set time of day, or a cleaner who borrows a power point for a couple of hours, or a truck driver who turns the freezer off when leaving Wollongong to have more power getting up the hill.

Getting back to the humidity loggers revealing unpleasant truths, we don’t know yet what the cause is, but they now know that there is something that has to be dealt with. They have the evidence to go to senior management to justify expenses, and a reference point to monitor success. While the truth may be unpleasant, it’s still pretty useful.