Who Uses Data Loggers and What Are They Used For?
If you’re not familiar with data loggers, which are stand-alone electronic instruments that can record measurements like temperature, humidity, or voltage, you might wonder who uses data loggers and what they are used for. As one of the largest distributors of data logging equipment in the US, we searched through our database of almost 15,000 customers and created the following charts that show what kind of organizations use data loggers and what kind of measurements the data loggers are used for.
Figure 1. Data Logger Use by Industry
Figure 1 shows the industry categories for the top data logger users. About 22% of our loggers are sold to customers in life sciences such as hospitals, pharmacies, blood banks, pharmaceutical companies, and research organizations. About 10% of our customers are educational organizations including colleges and universities and another 10% are manufacturers of many different types of products. Restaurants, production and packaging plants, growers, and other businesses in the food service industry follow closely at around 8%. This is followed by engineering organizations that use data loggers in product design, development and evaluation, reliability testing, and failure analysis at 7%. It’s also important to note that over 30% of our users are in other industries, companies like utilities, museums, HVAC, oil and gas production, and so on. The bottom line to answer the question “who do you sell to?” is that we have customers in virtually every industry.
Figure 2. Data Logger Use by Measurement
Figure 2 shows what measurements our data loggers are used for. By far, the most common parameter we measure is temperature, which represents 54% of the applications. When combined with a large percentage of customers in life sciences, it is apparent that monitoring the temperature in refrigerators, freezers, and cryostats drives a significant portion of the data logger market. This has been amplified over the last 2 years by the need to monitor Covid 19 vaccine storage. The second most common measurement is humidity with about 17% of data loggers going to this application. We find that humidity loggers are used in laboratories, storage areas, offices, construction areas, and test chambers. Our universal input data loggers are found to be used in 13% of applications that require simultaneously measuring multiple different types of signals such as temperature, voltage, and current for example capturing the temperature, pressure, and flow rate of a liquid in a pipe.
About 5% of the data loggers we sell are used to measure voltage, anything from the millivolt level output of a light sensor to 480 VAC on an incoming power line. Beyond this, much like the customers that we sell to, about 6% of the time our loggers are used with sensors to perform a very diverse set of measurements including vibration, wind speed and direction, gas concentration, pH, and so on. Although the most common use of our data loggers is for temperature measurements in life science-related applications, it is safe to say that they are used in virtually every industry to measure and record almost any parameter that you can think of!
To learn more about data loggers by measurement, data loggers by industry, or to find the ideal solution for your application-specific needs, contact a CAS Data Logger Applications Specialist at (800) 956-4437 or request more information.