A recent case study showed that to ensure optimal temperature conditions for successful ageing of its cheeses, Tilamook Cheese, a leading maker of naturally-aged cheese in Oregon USA, deployed more than 30 battery-powered data loggers in various sections of the facility’s storage area.
In natural-cheese making, life begins at 40. At least that’s the temperature at which the aging process can occur. However, as with winemaking, if temperature conditions aren’t just right, aging will not occur the way it’s supposed to.
Oregon-based Tilamook Cheese, a leading maker of naturally-aged cheese and other dairy products, has earned a reputation as one of the nation’s premier brands of cheese. To ensure that temperature conditions are optimal for successful aging in its automated warehouse, the company has deployed more than 30 battery-powered data loggers in various sections of the facility’s block storage area.
”At Tillamook, we make natural cheese, not processed cheese,” according to Jim Heffernan, a maintenance technician at the Tilamook plant. “It’s not easy to make natural cheese, but the finished product is worth the effort. Part of the care and effort that goes into the process is making sure that storage temperature conditions remain at a consistent 42 degrees. If it’s a little too warm, the ageing happens too fast. If it’s too cold, the ageing doesn’t happen at all.”
Intermittent drops in temperature were in fact a problem. Airflow changes had been occurring depending on how empty or full the storage area was, which in turn created areas that were too cold for proper ageing. Thus, there was a need for continuous temperature monitoring to pinpoint the cooler areas, and then take corrective action.
Tilamook first considered retrofitting the storage area with conventional temperature sensors. However, a more serious look at this approach suggested that installing hard-wired temperature sensors at many different points in the area would be extremely time-consuming and expensive. “Since the warehouse wasn’t initially set up for sensors, adding them after the fact would have taken months.”
Wireless temperature Sensors were the solution as these compact, battery-powered devices that are used for continuous monitoring of temperature provide excellent accuracy and reduce the risk of loss. The temperature sensors represented a quick and inexpensive fix to a critical climate control problem.
“The great thing about using lithium battery powered Wireless Temperature Sensors was that we could deploy them immediately, and start looking at temperature across all the various areas that we were concerned with,” says Heffernan. “We got everything set up within a few hours, and the loggers started taking readings every six seconds.”
The collected data can be graphed and analysed very quickly and they soon discovered that there was a four-degree temperature difference between the lower and upper regions of the storage area. To bridge this gap and create even temperature conditions, they installed two 20-inch high-capacity fans to circulate air across the lower region of the storage area. This, in effect, created an “air curtain” that evens out the temperature to a steady 42 degrees.
Since the temperature sensors were installed they have been running problem free, and one logger has even survived a major fall. “Once, while I was riding around on one of the warehouse cranes connecting the shuttle to a logger, I dropped the logger from a height of 70 feet,” explains Heffernan. “We took the satellite down to ground level and tried to find the missing logger. I was able to find both halves of the outer case, but we couldn’t find the tiny circuit board ‘brain.’ After about 15 minutes of searching, we gave up. Five days later, during a routine inspection of the crane, we found the ‘brain’ from the logger lodged in a recess on the crane. The logger didn’t miss a beat.”
Tilamook have since deployed additional Wireless Temperature Sensors in the finished products area of the warehouse, and has also found use for them in monitoring current on the plant’s refrigeration compressors to ensure that they are running at the highest efficiency.