Museum Climate Monitoring During Heatwaves
Heatwaves and climate fluctuations: what if your data became your best conservation tool?
Heatwaves, alternating periods of extreme dryness and high humidity, and extreme weather events now impose new demands on preventive conservation. As the C2RMF highlights, the risk stems not only from temperature or relative humidity values themselves, but above all from rapid fluctuations, to which materials react differently.
Collections made of wood, paper, parchment, textiles, leather, or composite materials are particularly sensitive to these fluctuations, which can cause warping, cracking, lifting, or loss of adhesion. In this context, understanding a building's actual climate behavior becomes an essential prerequisite for anticipating risks and adapting conservation strategies.
Climate monitoring is therefore no longer just about recording measurements. The challenge is now to understand, analyze, and leverage data in order to move from a reactive approach to a truly predictive one—capable of identifying drift before it affects collections.
Choosing monitoring tools tailored to your needs
The quality of analysis depends directly on the quality of the data collected. Sensor selection, placement, accuracy, battery life, transmission mode, and measurement frequency must all be tailored to the building's characteristics, the collections being preserved, and the monitoring objectives.
The Promuseum team supports heritage institutions in selecting the most suitable solutions for their needs, whether monitoring an exhibition room, a storage facility, a showcase, or an entire building. Our approach favors open, durable systems capable of evolving alongside an institution's needs while maximizing previous investments.
Preservarium: leveraging data to empower decision-making
Developed by MaFabrique, the Preservarium® platform centralizes and enhances climate data to streamline daily operations.
Fully customizable, it allows you to visualize measurements through custom graphs organized by sensor, room, or user profile. Alarms can be configured to immediately alert staff whenever defined thresholds for temperature, relative humidity, illuminance, or other monitored parameters are exceeded. The platform also features report generation and data export capabilities for tracking, auditing, or documentation purposes.
To take analysis further, additional modules automatically calculate key decision-support metrics—including absolute humidity, mixing ratio, condensation margin, and dew point—providing a deeper understanding of observed climate phenomena.
An efficient, simple solution for daily monitoring during crises and for managing your institution's spaces and storage
Preservarium® also allows you to integrate existing measurement histories to maintain data continuity. Open and interoperable, the platform is compatible with the main modern sensors on the market and works natively with the ArthelioS® range, including ArtSense T-HR and ArtSense T-HR-Lux sensors.
