How many Sensor Ports do I need?

The first question to answer when selecting a monitoring system is ‘how many environmental parameters’ do I want to monitor, and which are the most important. The top 3 factors to monitor a temperature, humidity and water leakage.

If you only want to monitor temperature for example, you need a monitoring device with a built-in or connected temperature sensor or a device with at least 1 sensor port for a plug-in sensor. The AKCP SP1+ or HW Group STE2-Lite devices both have connected sensor and provide 1 additional port which could be useful if you wanted to add additional sensors in the future.

Separate humidity sensors are available but the most common way is to use a combined plug-in temperature & humidity sensor. For this you need a monitoring base unit with at least one port. This assumes monitoring in only one location. This can be suitable for a single server rack but in rooms with multiple racks, you may want to monitor multiple points. This would lead to the need to install monitoring base units (1 in each location/server rack) or a single base device with sufficient ports for all the plug-in sensors. Suitable devices with multiple sensor ports include the STE2-R2, Perseus 140-155 and SensorProbe+ (SPX4, SPX4, SPX16) devices.

Water leakage sensors will only require a plug-on port to connect to on the monitoring device. In a single location this means where you want to monitor temperature, humidity and water leakage you will need at least 3 sensor ports.