Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to the questions we hear most from compliance, quality, and plant-operations teams.
Compliance & Records
Under FSIS regulation 9 CFR 417.5(e), records for slaughter activities and refrigerated products must be retained for at least one year, and records for frozen, preserved, or shelf-stable products for at least two years. Records may be stored off-site after six months only if they can be produced on-site within 24 hours of an FSIS request. ChirpDat retains your complete monitoring history for the life of your service and generates any date range on demand — so a records request is answered in minutes, not scrambled for in 24 hours. Where the data lives, who can see it, and how you get it back are set out on our security and data page.
Yes. 9 CFR 417.5(d) explicitly permits records maintained on computers, provided appropriate controls ensure the integrity of the electronic data and signatures. That integrity requirement is exactly what ChirpDat is built for: every reading is time-stamped at capture, stored tamper-evident, and every report prints a cryptographic fingerprint of the data behind it, so a report can be checked back against the stored record.
FSIS requires records documenting the monitoring of critical control points and their critical limits — including actual times and temperatures, the calibration of process-monitoring instruments, corrective actions taken in response to deviations, and verification results, each dated (9 CFR 417.5(a)(3)). ChirpDat produces the times, temperatures, calibration documentation, and dated event history automatically; your team documents corrective actions against alerts that are already on the record.
A tamper-evident record is one that cannot be altered, backdated, or deleted after it is captured without the change being detectable. Paper logs and editable spreadsheets offer no such protection. ChirpDat time-stamps every reading at the moment of measurement, stores it in tamper-evident form, and prints a cryptographic fingerprint of the data on every report — so a report can be checked back against the stored record when an inspector, an insurer, or a customer questions it.
State meat inspection programs must be “at least equal to” federal FSIS requirements, so state-inspected plants generally face the same record-keeping expectations, and many state programs audit temperature logs just as closely. If you’re unsure what your state program expects, ask us — we work with state-inspected processors and can point you to your program’s requirements.
Calibration
NIST-traceable calibration means a sensor’s accuracy has been verified against a reference standard with an unbroken chain of comparisons back to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It matters because FSIS record requirements include the calibration of process-monitoring instruments — an inspector can ask how you know your thermometer is right. An uncalibrated sensor is an opinion; a NIST-traceable sensor is evidence.
Annually. Every year, your Managed Monitoring service ships a freshly NIST-calibrated reference sensor to your facility, and your calibration documentation is updated so it’s ready the moment an auditor asks for it.
Alerts
Yes. ChirpDat sends alerts by SMS text, voice call, email, and webhook. Critical alerts place a voice call that repeats until a human acknowledges it — because a 2 AM freezer failure needs a phone that rings, not an email that waits until morning.
A warning alert is an early heads-up: a reading has crossed your warning threshold and stayed there for the time you specify — it notifies your chosen team by SMS and email. A critical alert means a critical limit has been crossed: it escalates by voice call and keeps escalating until someone acknowledges it. You set both thresholds, the sustain time, and who gets alerted, for every monitored point.
Every alert rule includes a sustain time — the condition must remain true for the number of minutes you set before an alert fires. A cooler door open for 30 seconds during loading is normal; open for 10 minutes, it’s an event. You tune thresholds and sustain times per zone, and we help you set values that match your HACCP plan.
Yes. ChirpDat’s webhook channel pushes alert and event data in real time to any system that accepts an HTTP request — ERP, CMMS/maintenance software, building automation, or a custom endpoint. Your monitoring data doesn’t have to live in one more silo.
Reporting
Daily, monthly, and annual compliance reports (annual summary delivered each year), delivered automatically by email, at the detail level you choose: summary (daily min/max/average per zone), standard (hourly readings plus every threshold event), or full record (every reading, every event — the densest audit trail). Any custom date range can be generated on demand in one click. You can view a sample daily report here.
You open your dashboard, select the date range they ask for, and hand them a signed report — complete, continuous, and impossible to backdate. What used to be a two-day paper chase becomes a two-minute task.
Installation & Operations
Your entire kit — sensors, gateway, everything — is configured, paired, labeled by zone, and bench-tested before it ships. You mount the sensors following an illustrated placement guide, text us photos before permanent mounting, and we verify signal coverage remotely, zone by zone. No technician visits your facility, no production interruption, and most facilities are live within days of the kit arriving.
Yes. White-glove onsite installation is available for facilities that prefer hands-on deployment: we place and mount every sensor, validate coverage zone by zone, and train your staff on the floor. Most customers choose zero-touch; complex or multi-building facilities sometimes prefer onsite. Both are quoted up front.
It doesn’t have to touch your network at all — the standard deployment uses a cellular gateway with its own data plan, which most plant IT departments prefer. Sensors also store readings locally and retransmit when connectivity returns, so a network outage doesn’t create a gap in your compliance record. And if we lose contact with your gateway, you get a “we can’t see your plant” alert — you’ll know about an outage before it can cost you.
Temperature (ambient, cooler/freezer, and food-grade insertion probes), humidity, door and access events, equipment current (including compressor-stopped detection), water leak (spot and zone), gas detection including ammonia, CO2 and air quality, tank and bin level, pipe pressure, and power state. We’re hardware-agnostic — we deploy industrial sensors from multiple manufacturers, so you’re never locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem.
Pricing
ChirpDat deployment is $2,500 once for Facility Connectivity and Commissioning plus $395 once per monitored point. Managed Monitoring is $750 a month and includes the first 10 monitored points; each additional point is $25 a month. A 50-point facility is $22,250 one-time and $1,750 a month — $43,250 in the first year. Volume pricing is available above 100 monitored points. Specialized instrumentation, licensed electrical work, additional gateways, and unusual site requirements are identified during scoping and quoted before deployment. You can price your own facility in about three minutes with our Build Your Monitoring Plan tool, and see the system live in a 15-minute demo before committing.
Yes — book a 15-minute live screen-share demo. You’ll see a real compliance dashboard on live data, real alerts, and a real audit report generated in front of you, so you can judge exactly what you’re buying before spending a dollar.
A monitored point is one sensing point ChirpDat provisions, monitors and alerts on — not every telemetry value it produces. Main Cooler temperature and humidity is one point, because it is one sensor. South Door state is one point. A compressor’s operating condition is one point. A three-phase electrical panel is three, because each leg has its own current sensor, its own thresholds and its own alert path. A sensor reporting temperature, humidity, battery level and radio diagnostics is still one point, not four.
24/7 recording of every monitored point, warning and critical alerts by SMS, voice call, email and webhook, dashboards, and automatic compliance reports. Software updates and security patches are part of operating the service, not a paid add-on. For environmental monitoring points, a freshly NIST-calibrated reference sensor ships annually with updated calibration documentation. The first 10 monitored points are included in the $750.
Each additional monitored point is $25 a month. Ten points is $750 a month, 25 points is $1,125, 50 points is $1,750, and 100 points is $3,000.
$2,500, once. Edge connectivity hardware, provisioning, configuration, account and site setup, communications setup, commissioning, and remote go-live verification. You are buying a commissioned connectivity layer for the site, not a gateway appliance off a shelf. That connectivity is independently managed and does not depend on your production network.
$395, once, per monitored point: monitoring hardware, configuration, bench testing, asset and zone labeling, account provisioning, documentation, and remote verification. It covers standard monitoring hardware.
It is identified during scoping and quoted before deployment. Specialized instrumentation, licensed electrical work, additional gateways, and unusual coverage requirements sit outside the $395 point price so nothing arrives later as a surprise line item.
Yes. Most single-building sites need one, but building size, construction and layout can require more. That is determined during the site audit and quoted before deployment — the estimator’s one-time figure assumes a single gateway.
Yes. Temperature and humidity are one category. ChirpDat also monitors door and access state, electrical current and phase condition, compressor and equipment operating state, and other supported facility telemetry — brought into one managed record instead of sitting in separate systems.
Yes. Environmental conditions, access state, electrical behaviour and equipment state land on the same timeline, in the same alerting system, in the same record. When a cooler warms up you can see what the door, the compressor and the panel were doing before, during and after — the conditions surrounding the excursion, not just the excursion.