[Data] logger trace: 6 days transit, 41 hours above 8°C, powder was fine
Dropped an £18 USB logger in the box. Full trace summarised:
| Segment | Hours | Max | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Origin to airport | 9 | 9.1°C | gel pack still solid |
| In transit | 26 | 21.4°C | pack fully liquid by hour 30 |
| Customs hold | 31 | 18.2°C | indoor, stable |
| Local delivery | 6 | 24.8°C | van, afternoon, worst reading of the trip |
Total above 8°C: about 41 hours, peak in the mid-20s. Powder tested afterwards at 98.4% against a 98.5% claim.
The conclusion I draw is the unfashionable one: dry powder tolerates this far better than the packaging theatre implies, and the last leg — a van on a summer afternoon — is consistently the hottest part of the journey, which is the leg nobody photographs.
best — the order this archive was captured in
This is the reference post for the community and I am stickying it. One thing to underline because it gets missed: the pack exhausting by hour 30 is by design on a six-day lane. A gel pack is not meant to last the whole trip; it is meant to buy you the first day while the parcel is still warm from the origin.
People treat a liquid gel pack as evidence of failure. It is evidence of a finite coolant budget being spent.
£18, CSV export, argument over in thirty seconds. i own four and i will lend one to anybody who asks. the number of disputes on this site that a logger would have ended is genuinely depressing.
the other thing a logger shows you is your own fridge. i put one in mine for a week expecting to be smug and found 2.1°C at the back and 7.8°C in the door.
NEVER. THE. DOOR.
two below-spec results on this site this quarter traced back to a mixed vial in a fridge door. the door is not a joke, it is the single most common storage error we see.
can confirm, it was mine, and it cost me a vial and a great deal of dignity.
your dignity bought several people a working fridge shelf. good trade.
photograph at unboxing, before you unpack. that photo is the only evidence that will ever exist of the state it arrived in and you get exactly one chance at it.
and this is why the p90 matters more than the median. the median lane does not exhaust the pack before the last leg. the p90 does.
so cold shipping is a scam then, they should just send it in an envelope
no. the packaging is there for the worst-case transit and for the case where somebody reconstitutes on arrival, and it costs the vendor almost nothing. "usually survivable" is not the same as "unnecessary".
- 1£18, CSV export, argument over in thirty seconds. i own four and i will lend…6 comments in this branch · started by u/usb_logger_ursula