Labs are some of the most energy-intensive spaces of any industry, typically using 5 to 10 times more energy per square foot than office buildings. Freezers, incubators, and cold storage units hum around the clock, every day of the year. Of all lab equipment, cold storage is one of the biggest and least examined pieces of the puzzle. 

That's exactly the gap the Freezer Challenge by My Green Lab was built to close. Each year, thousands of labs worldwide take part in a structured effort to optimize their cold storage, organizing inventory, adjusting setpoints, defrosting units, and retiring equipment that has outlived its usefulness. The results add up: participating labs have collectively saved more than 130M kWh since 2017 and counting. These improvements, it turns out, rarely require anything complicated. Mostly, they require attention, and the payoff is real. A single neglected ultra-low temperature (ULT) freezer can waste hundreds of dollars in energy a year, in plain sight.

Even the best-run program meets the same physical reality every lab already knows: once a freezer is cleaned out, dialed in, and optimized, it doesn't stay that way on its own. Settings drift, seals wear, filters clog, ice accumulates. A unit that was in great shape earlier in the year can slip quietly out of alignment before anyone circles back to check. It doesn't look like a problem. A freezer that is still holding temperature rarely does, even while it is consuming more power than it should.

That's simply how equipment behaves. A once-a-year push gets performance where it should be. Keeping it there takes something that keeps watching in between.