Borstal, Kent · ME1
Security for cold stores: risks and specification
Temperature-sensitive stock represents a substantial financial exposure if refrigeration fails, alongside the standard theft risks of any warehouse holding valuable goods. This page sets out what a Borstal cold store should be asking for, and where mobile credential access systems fit into it.
- Sector: cold stores
- Lead service: burglar alarms
- Exposure: Overnight and weekends, when a failure could go unnoticed for the longest period, present the greatest financial risk.
Primary risk
Temperature-sensitive stock represents a substantial financial exposure if refrigeration fails, alongside the standard theft risks of any warehouse holding valuable goods.
First priority
Access control on the cold store entrance
Common pitfall
Relying solely on the refrigeration unit's own internal alarm, which typically has no route to notify anyone off site if the building itself loses power overnight.
The threat in practice
Temperature-sensitive stock represents a substantial financial exposure if refrigeration fails, alongside the standard theft risks of any warehouse holding valuable goods.
Exposure window: Overnight and weekends, when a failure could go unnoticed for the longest period, present the greatest financial risk.
The duty that drives the design
Ignore this and the system may work perfectly while still being the wrong system for cold stores.
- Food safety obligations require documented temperature control, and monitoring evidence supports that record
Priority items, with the reasoning
- Access control on the cold store entrance
- Limits and logs who enters, supporting both security and food safety traceability.
- Perimeter and loading-bay camera coverage
- Standard protection for goods movement, which is where most physical theft risk in a cold store sits.
A common design error on this trade
Relying solely on the refrigeration unit's own internal alarm, which typically has no route to notify anyone off site if the building itself loses power overnight.
Where mobile credential access systems fit
Access control where the credential is issued to a phone, so permissions can be granted and withdrawn remotely without handing over hardware.
- Organisations that want to stop distributing and collecting hardware
- Multi-site operations managing access centrally
The limits, stated plainly
Being straight about the boundary costs less than discovering it after an incident.
- Usually a subscription platform rather than a one-off purchase.
A different option for the same problem
- A mixed deployment
- Staff use phones and visitors use cards, which is the common real-world arrangement.
The support call this sector makes most: alarm zone showing as omitted and not being monitored
Once a system has been in a while, understand and fix an omitted alarm zone is a common reason for a cold store to ring.
Usually it comes down to zone manually omitted after a fault and never reinstated, omitting a faulty zone is a legitimate temporary fix, but it is easy to forget to remove it once the underlying issue is resolved.
Before booking anyone, review the panel event log for when the omission was set and by which user code.
What Borstal adds to the brief
Borstal work tends to cluster near Burham Marshes and Borstal village green, where the housing stock is mostly riverside cottages and post-war semis, and that mix decides where cable can run and where detection earns its place.
Borstal questions we get asked
Security for cold stores: risks and specification
Local detail for Borstal
- Alarms, CCTV, access control and network cabling under one contact
- Email enquiries: info@wisetechsecurity.co.uk
- Surveys carried out on site before anything is specified
Survey first, specification second
We will explain why each item is on the list. If something cannot be justified, it should not be on your quotation.
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