Patrick Gilbert
Technical Director - Agarose at Purolite Life Sciences
I’ve worked with GPE Scientific for many years, they’re a long-standing supplier of laboratory equipment to Purolite’s UK R&D Centre of Excellence in South Wales. We share our equipment requirements with GPE, and they provide advice on the suitability of a wide range of chemistry and life science laboratory equipment.
Purolite manufactures the ion exchange and affinity resins used in different separation, purification, and decontamination processes, with applications ranging from water softening to the purification of biopharmaceuticals. These products are specialised and highly valuable and need to be stored at precise temperatures in fridges and freezers. We also store large quantities of chemicals at specific temperature and humidity levels in our warehouses. For these reasons we were compelled to undertake manual checks of all our assets every day.
GPE Scientific made me aware of new technology that could take the onus off staff and provide round the clock monitoring of every asset on our estate, alerting us to fluctuations in temperature and humidity in time to fix the situation before it became serious. This meant we would no longer have to worry about what was happening out of hours, a particular vulnerability when we were doing checks manually.
GPE recommended KoolZone. They provide IoT-based (Internet of Things) sensors, gateways, and monitoring software. Their IoT technology is long-range, wireless, and low-power and this was of particular interest to me because we wanted an inexpensive and flexible solution that allowed us to monitor and reconfigure out assets without major upheaval.
After a demo which showed me how the sensors capture data via a cellular gateway that can be accessed from any mobile device, I sent KoolZone a plan of our facility. and they used it to map the sensors we needed. KoolZone’s long range (LoRa) technology meant we only needed a single router.
It became evident to me that KoolZone was exactly what we needed, I purchased a range of temperature sensors for our fridges and freezers and temperature and humidity sensors for the warehouses. There is no software or wiring to install, simply place the sensor where you want it, login, and access the data. I set-up alarms so I am notified by text if an asset falls out of a set temperature range. Furthermore, I can generate reliable reports quickly, I don’t have to wait for the old manual checks that were so prone to human error.
Before long, KoolZone highlighted an ongoing issue with an old freezer, which we replaced before it failed, saving us time and money.
I would recommend the GPE Scientific-KoolZone solution, it gives my colleagues and I peace of mind, which is hard to put a price on.