It is quarter past two in the morning. A chiller trips, a cooling unit fails, or the power changes over. Nobody is in the building. By morning conditions have recovered and everything looks normal — and weeks later a batch fails, a consignment is rejected, or an auditor asks for the record.
EnviroWatch records temperature, humidity and pressure continuously, alarms when approved limits are breached, and produces the evidence when someone asks for it.
Seven questions · three minutes · written summary within two working days
Where records fail
The hours when equipment fails are the hours when no one is present. Without continuous recording, the event leaves no trace at all.
Most excursions happen in the gap during a power transition. Manual checks resume hours later, by which time conditions have recovered.
Regulators, certification bodies and institutional customers increasingly ask for historical data. Verbal assurance no longer answers the question.
Why now
Nobody buys monitoring because they read a page. They buy in a particular week, because something happened.
An auditor, regulator or customer has asked for historical records — and the answer was uncomfortable.
You have lost stock, a batch or a consignment and cannot say exactly when or why.
A customer contract now requires documented storage conditions.
You are pursuing NAFDAC, ISO 9001, ISO 22000 or HACCP certification.
A new cold room, store or laboratory has just been commissioned.
A sponsor or funder has made monitoring a condition of the programme.
If an auditor asks in March for last quarter's data and you began monitoring in February, that gap is permanent. No supplier can close it, and no amount of money buys it back.
Every week without monitoring is a week permanently missing from your evidence — which is the one argument against waiting for the next budget cycle that we can make honestly.
A single failed batch, spoiled cold room or rejected consignment typically costs more than monitoring the whole facility for several years. Put your own stock value against a deployment cost and the case makes itself.
When a regulator or customer asks for the record, it is not the company that answers — it is the quality manager, the chief pharmacist, the store officer. Their name is on the deviation report.
The record begins the day the instruments do. Nothing recovers the months before that, so the cheapest possible version of this system, installed now, beats the ideal version installed next year.
Where it is deployed
Twelve kinds of buyer, one requirement. The parameter changes, the limits change, the regulator changes — the need for continuous, defensible evidence does not.
Beyond cold chain
We monitor differential pressure as well — the parameter that governs containment laboratories, isolation facilities, cleanrooms and controlled production. It was first delivered as a custom engineered build for a federal public health agency, because no catalogue device met the requirement.
It is the difference between monitoring a refrigerator and monitoring a controlled environment.
Ambient, chilled, frozen, deep-freeze, cryogenic and high-temperature applications. Your requirement establishes the band; we specify the instrument to it.
Storage, production, packaging and laboratory areas where moisture affects product, sample or process integrity.
Containment labs, isolation rooms, cleanrooms and controlled production environments.
Instrument selection
We hold no exclusive supply arrangement obliging us to recommend one manufacturer. Your answers decide the instrument class; the class decides the shortlist. We have specified across five device families because our clients' requirements differed.
| Class | Specify when | Do not specify when |
|---|---|---|
| A | Ambient or chilled, fixed, low criticality, staffed site, budget constrained | A live reading, an audible alarm or humidity is needed |
| B | Fixed zones needing on-site display, local alarm, temperature and humidity, audit-grade records, no subscription | The site is unoccupied out of hours and the stock is high value |
| C | Unattended out of hours, remote alerting essential, usable Wi-Fi at the point | No reliable network, or no appetite for a subscription |
| D | Vehicles, goods in transit, remote sites, or fixed points with no usable network | Budget-constrained fixed installs where cellular cost is not justified |
| E | Many monitoring points, or accredited and GxP environments needing formal IQ/OQ/PQ qualification documentation | A handful of points where a standalone instrument does the same job for far less |
| F | One-way shipments and exports where goods leave your custody | Long-term fixed monitoring, where per-shipment cost accumulates |
| Custom | Requirements no catalogue device meets — including differential pressure | A catalogue device already meets the requirement |
The chain
Four links. If one breaks, the other three stop mattering. A sensor nobody reads, an alarm nobody hears and a record nobody can produce are the same outcome.
The data path
The link differs by class, and we tell you which one you are getting: Class A/B — USB or Bluetooth, downloaded on site, no gateway and no subscription. Class C — Wi-Fi to a cloud platform with remote alerting. Class D — cellular, for vehicles and sites with no usable network. Custom — wired to a gateway, as built for differential pressure.
The engagement
Steps 7 to 9 do not end. That is the difference between an installation and a monitoring programme.
For smaller facilities
Most pharmacies, diagnostic centres and small clinics need three to eight monitoring points, not thirty. For those we quote a standard package straight from your readiness check — no site visit, installed in a day.
Instruments configured to your approved limits, labelled and installed in one visit, with a short written procedure and handover training.
Everything in Essential, plus a reserve unit so downloads and recalibration never leave a gap, on-site training and a commissioning record.
Everything in Standard, plus a mapping walk-through to find worst-case points and a full monitoring SOP.
The full eight-phase deployment with site survey, approved limits workshop, commissioning run and ongoing calibration management.
Take the readiness check and we will tell you which package fits — including when the smallest one is enough.
How a deployment runs
Installing data loggers does not make a facility compliant. Approved limits, a written procedure, trained staff and retained records do — and all four are in scope.
Typical ten-point deployment: fifteen working days from order to handover.
Site walk-through and thermal mapping to find the worst-case points, then a setpoint workshop with your quality function. We configure to limits you approve — never limits we invented.
Every unit configured, asset-labelled and function-tested on the bench, then mounted, probe-routed and verified live at each point.
A written monitoring SOP covering daily checks, download cadence, excursion response and escalation — plus operator and administrator training, so the system survives a change of shift.
Seven-day observation run, limits tuned, verification report issued. Then scheduled battery replacement and recalibration — because a missed battery is the commonest cause of a silent gap in the record.
Stated plainly
Every proposal we issue names the limits of what we are selling, before you find them:
Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023
Temperature and humidity readings are not personal data. But the moment a record names the officer who took the reading, the nurse who acknowledged the alarm or the staff member who opened the cold room, you are processing personal data under the NDPA 2023 — and most facilities discover that at an audit rather than at design.
It matters again with networked devices. A Wi-Fi or cellular logger sends your data to a cloud platform, and that platform is often hosted outside Nigeria. That is a cross-border transfer, and it carries obligations that a monitoring supplier ought to raise before installation, not after.
SO TechAfrica is led by a Certified Data Protection Officer. We treat the record as carefully as the reading.
Where we hold or handle your monitoring data, our role as processor is set out in writing — scope, retention, security and what happens at the end of the engagement.
If your chosen device stores data abroad, we tell you at specification stage and set out what that means, so it is a decision rather than a discovery.
Your monitoring procedure states how long records are kept, who may see them and on what lawful basis — the questions the NDPC would ask.
The account, the exports and the archive belong to you. We do not resell, aggregate or retain your records beyond the agreed term.
For sponsors and programmes
If you fund a study, a trial or a programme across several locations, every site must store product, samples or reagents under defined conditions — and evidence them on demand, to a monitor, an auditor or an ethics committee.
In practice each site uses whatever it already has. Records sit on paper. Devices are procured centrally, never calibrated, never downloaded. By the time a monitoring visit finds the gap, the period cannot be reconstructed.
We have delivered fixed monitoring across five federal teaching hospitals in four states under a single sponsored programme — same instruments, same procedure, same records at every site.
We return a device class recommendation per site and an indicative multi-site budget — no cost, no obligation.
Not five procurement conversations, five installation standards and five report formats. One deployment standard, applied everywhere.
The same record structure in Kano as in Enugu, with instrument identity and calibration reference attached to every reading.
Batteries expire and instruments drift. Scheduled replacement and recalibration are priced in — which is why funded installations usually stop producing usable data by year two, and ours do not.
Free · no obligation · no site visit
Answer seven questions and one of our engineers sends you a written summary within two working days — which of your areas need monitoring, which do not, what class of instrument fits, and roughly what a correct deployment costs.
If the honest answer is that you do not need us, that will be in the summary.
The check itself is free and needs no visit. Where a site survey follows, its logistics are funded by the client and quoted up front.
Questions
Yes. You get a written summary whether or not you go further with us, and there is no site visit involved.
Whichever fits your answers. We work across the major manufacturers and select on requirement, availability and local support — not on a single supplier relationship.
The deciding factor is usually whether your site is occupied out of hours. If it is staffed around the clock, an on-site alarm often does the job at a fraction of the cost and with no subscription. If it is empty overnight and the stock is valuable, remote alerting is the entire point.
Where required, instruments are supplied with ISO/IEC 17025 traceable calibration certificates and placed on a scheduled recalibration cycle. Where it is not required, we will tell you — accredited calibration adds real cost and lead time.
The readings themselves are not personal data. It engages the Act when records are linked to named individuals — shift logs, alarm acknowledgements, access records — or when a networked device sends data to a platform hosted outside Nigeria, which is a cross-border transfer. We raise both at specification stage and put our processor role in writing.
Yes. Our largest programme covered five federal teaching hospitals across four states under a single sponsor, with the same instrumentation, procedure and record structure at every site.
The readiness check and the summary we send back are free. Advisory and consultancy work is not — a full specification, a written monitoring procedure, qualification documentation, or support procuring independently of us is a paid engagement, scoped and quoted before any work begins. You will know the cost before you commit to it.
The readiness check is free and needs no visit. A site survey is different: it puts an engineer on your site for a day or more, and the logistics — travel, accommodation and site attendance — are funded by you. We itemise those in the quotation and agree them before anything is scheduled, so there are no surprises.
A typical ten-point facility runs fifteen working days from signed order to handover, subject to stock and site access.