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Comment by swarfield | Hacker News Reader

Why the fuck are those fridges even networked!?

Because they need remote monitoring. I have experience with HVAC so I'm guessing these are similar: typically outsourced to a third party, typically a VM running on a dedicated server, accessible by Citrix or something similar. Supermarkets don't internally staff fridge repairmen.

They could just use connected temperature probes though. no need to connect the power supply of the damn compressor to the internet.

A lot of these devices are temperature controllable as the product in them may require different temperatures. They can have temperature ranges from refrigeration to freezing.

Also adjust power usage depending on time of day and such.

You can schedule power usage with a dummy controller. I'm not sure of any products sold that are that specific to temp in my grocery store at least. Either it is refrigerated or frozen.

Have you ever had to manage any of these things or are you just guessing?

You don't need to network the fridge though... You just need a networked sensor...

That's assuming you just need to maintain a static temperature, which probably isn't the case.

They aren’t fridges, it’s a grocery store. You have obviously been in one, there are cases with a dozen doors that all open to the same cold case.

There is a ton of refrigerant piping, multiple condensing units, multiple evaporators, relays, and sensors connected to a controller that automates the refrigeration system. Not standalone refrigerators.

I shouldn’t need to list the benefits of remotely monitoring a system that can cause tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars if it fails.

Given the perfectly workable alternative of not having remote monitoring and simply having the store manager contact a repair tech on the exceedingly rare occasion that there is an issue, yeah I think actually you do need to justify the added complexity and expense of making this kind of mundane equipment internet accessible.

From my experience in a restaurant, those large commercial rooftop refrigeration/freezer units need attention several times a year. It's rare that your home fridge would have trouble that often but commercial units are more complicated and in a harsher environment. And supermarket installations are probably even more complicated.

Routine service and maintenance doesn't require net connectivity to schedule.

Agreed. I was just addressing that it's not exceedingly rare to need to get a tech out on site to address something. Should the manager be on top of this, checking temps on all the cases every day? Absolutely, but I can see the argument for a more automated system of monitors/alarms that can get a tech dispatched before the manager has even noticed the problem.

Not all issues are routine.

So we schedule service, and then we throw away all the food anyway because the problem cannot be addressed remotely.

I'm pretty confident there is no failure mode industrial cooling equipment can experience that can be solved remotely. Remote monitoring and control systems on the other hand...

Sure there is.

Suppose the condition is that temperature in the freezers is rising, producing active concern for the contents.

A smart person with the right access can see that, and also correlate it with other things.

Like:

The doors to the building are open, while the HVAC takes a break because the weather is temperate and isn't dehumidifying as it would be on a hot day?

And it's a holiday food-buying week, so the freezers' doors are open for buying and restocking more than usual?

If the refrigerant pressures and other stats also fit the scenario, then: The evap coils may just be iced up. If they can be defrosted from the comfort of your desk a thousand miles away, then that's pretty great. Just like what was done (to malicious extreme) here.

(You're a smart person. You could correlate these things yourself if this were your trade, save a trip [or many, many trips across a chain], and get paid to make these kinds of things happen remotely.)

"A smart person with the right access can see that", so like a store employee glancing at your choice of an analog temperature display or a telltale light? A perfectly workable solution that persists for the vast majority of the restaurant industry and every independent grocery store in the country, and has done for roughly the last century. Adding the kind of aggressively stupid failure modes that software drags into the discussion (eg. russian bot networks are attacking the ice cream) to avoid having to occasionally inspect equipment doesn't seem particularly bright.

These systems only exist because those economics were decided decades ago. Issues are not exceptions in systems like this. They are huge, complex, and interface with the public.

The systems track all kinds of data and are decent at predicting failures before they get expensive.

Marketing. The restaurant industry doesn't have less skin in the game than grocery retailers re avoiding spoilage and net connected walk-in coolers and freezers are not a thing.

None of the supermarkets were managed by Commander Adama, apparently.

Centralized maintenance and monitoring?

It seems like the sort of thing you’d do in-store and firewalled from the internet.

You’d have to pay competent local staff for that.

How do you think grocery stores worked pre internet?

Lots of things worked pre-internet that now rely on internet in ways that would be rather chaotic and messy to undo.

You're going to have to convince VC and PE to give up the massive profits they're raking in.

They were paying competent local staff pre-internet.

"That, like, costs money, man. The accounting department said there was a 1-in-100 year chance of this happening if we didn't shell out, so we didn't." - the CEO, probably.

The article didn't say they weren't.

Monitoring makes sense, but it feels like it makes no sense at all to allow that kind of remote maintenance without staff on-site to OK and verify it - who could then do the maintenance themselves.

Otherwise, this sort of spoilage could easily happen by accident as well.

Supermarkets don't staff HVAC/fridge repairmen. There are separate companies they pay to do this.

Right: and someone from that company can come out and do maintenance when the monitoring indicates it's necessary

When, say, your internet craps out, would you rather your ISP try to resolve the problem, or schedule to send a tech out to your home before they start working on fixing the issue?

Groceries see HVAC in the same way. If they can get their issue addressed or diagnosed by their HVAC contractor without him having to schedule and physically travel to their site, they'd prefer him to solve/start solving the problem immediately. Time is money and the faster the tech can diagnose the problem, the faster he can get on fixing it.

And yes, the prevalence of these systems means that many HVAC techs have the ability to turn off their customers' air conditioners/fridges. They don't use it maliciously, because that would be actual suicide for their business.

---

Source: A close friend of mine runs an HVAC business (~8 employees) doing residential and commercial installs, repairs, and maintenance.

> remote maintenance without staff on-site to OK and verify it - who could then do the maintenance themselves

These are minimum wage workers - they don't have bean bags in the nap room, employee massages and stock options.

Makes sense but monitoring doesn't mean you have to have remote control of power.

"Utility has alerted us to an upcoming brown-out in a region impacting 40 stores. Cool everything down a few extra degrees in preparation."

A phone call from the HVAC company and physical thermostat dial (in a locked cabinet to prevent incompetent/malicious employees tampering with it) seems a safer solution.

And when it happens at 3 in the morning? And when those people are in a meeting 10 miles down the road?

Take away the security aspect and centralized management is just so much easier and reliable. Humans suck at doing things they were supposed to.

Some grocery stores - and this is probably far more common in France - have no staff overnight.

I think the cost/benefit equation is gonna collapse in the era of AIs exploting vulnerabilities at scale, but it's not like there's zero theoretical benefit of this capability on its own.

That might justify a temperature probe in a dumb fridge. This smells of a salesman being here not an engineer though.

And centralized food destruction.

To monitor when something like this happens...

Wait until people living north of Chicago learn that their thermostats are remotely controlled, when it's -20F outside.

So you can get a notification when the milk expires.

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