Your cool room alarm went off after hours. Here's what to do.

Step one: acknowledge, then read the trend

Acknowledge the alarm first so it stops climbing to the next person on the list. Then look at the trend, not just the single alert. Two numbers tell you nearly everything: how far out of range the room is now, and how fast it's moving. A coolroom sitting at 6°C and steady after a door was left open is a minor problem. One at 12°C and still rising is a failed compressor, and the clock is running.

Step two: get eyes on it, fast

Australian food safety rules don't set a single fixed response time, but speed is what protects your stock and your position. A practical rule of thumb many operators use is to respond within about 30 minutes during trading and within a couple of hours after hours. Get to the site, or send whoever is closest on your escalation list. The sooner someone is standing in front of the room, the more options you still have.

Step three: find the cause

Common after-hours causes, roughly in the order they turn up:

• A door left ajar after the last delivery or the close-down clean. The most common one, and the easiest to fix.
• A power failure, often the real trigger, which is why a power-fail alert earns its keep on its own.
• A compressor that has tripped or is failing, showing as a steady climb that never recovers.
• A blocked condenser or an iced-up evaporator, where the room loses ground slowly over hours.

If it's a door, close it and watch the room pull back down. If it's the refrigeration, you're in stock-protection mode now.

What not to do at 2am

Three mistakes cost people stock they could have kept, or land them in trouble they could have avoided:

• Don't silence the alarm and go back to sleep. Acknowledging so it stops nagging the group chat is fine. Deciding "it'll be right till morning" is how a 40-minute door problem becomes a four-hour write-off.
• Don't open the failed room to "check". If refrigeration is down, every time you open the door you dump warm air in and speed up the climb. Read it off the monitor, not by standing in the doorway.
• Don't pile everything into one working room and choke it. Overload a healthy coolroom and you turn one breach into two. Split the load, and if the freezer has headroom, park the highest-risk product there first.

Step four: protect the stock, and note the time

Move what you can into a working coolroom, a freezer or a neighbouring site, highest-risk product first. The single most important thing to write down is when the breach started, because that one fact drives every call about what's safe to keep. A continuous log hands you that start time exactly. A guess after the fact doesn't, and a guess is what an auditor will treat it as.

The 2-hour and 4-hour rule

For ready-to-eat potentially hazardous food, the danger zone is 5°C to 60°C, and time in that zone is what counts:

• Under 2 hours in the zone: it can go back into cold storage.
• 2 to 4 hours: use it, don't re-refrigerate it.
• Beyond 4 hours: throw it out.

This is exactly why the start time is worth so much. If your log shows the room was out of range for 40 minutes before you acted, you can keep stock with confidence instead of binning a full room out of caution. When in doubt, throw it out. But good records often mean you don't have to. This is general guidance, not legal advice, so confirm the detail with your local council.

Write it down while it's happening

An auditor cares about two things after a breach: that you knew, and that you responded. The way you prove both is a short, honest record made on the night, not a tidy version written up a week later. Note the time the alarm fired, the reading when you got to the room, the cause, what you moved and where, and the time the room came back into range. It takes five minutes and it's the difference between "we caught it and acted" and "we found out at open".

A continuous log does most of that work for you. It timestamps the breach, the peak, and the recovery without anyone having to remember to look at a thermometer. Your job on the night shrinks to recording the decisions a machine can't make: what you did about it. Own the record and you own the outcome. Rely on memory and you're arguing from the back foot.

The part that decides all of it: actually being woken

None of the above happens if the alarm is a silent badge on a face-down phone. After hours, an alarm has to climb: push, then SMS, then a real phone call, to more than one person, until someone answers. And it has to keep working through the blackout that often caused the failure in the first place. That escalation, plus battery and 4G failover, is the whole reason a monitored coolroom alarm beats a cheap Wi-Fi sensor that pings an app nobody hears at 2am. For the paperwork side, see cool room temperature log requirements.

Common questions