Temperature Specialists
The Promise of Highly-Reliable Sensors

A twist in the tale is what best describes the journey of Temperature Specialists. It all began in the year 1976 when Robert and Carolyn O’Brien, the founders of the company, as part of their career growth, decided to relocate to California from Minnesota. Before shifting, they visited California to buy a house. To their surprise, they discovered that there were only three houses or lots available for purchase, within 40 miles of the new plant location because of a water moratorium limiting the population in the valley.

“Being experts in the sensor manufacturing arena, this set my parents thinking. Why not stay in Minnesota and help people in California save power and water by using smart sensors?” recalls Timothy J. O’Brien, General Manager of Temperature Specialists. This was the genesis of Temperature Specialists. “Initially, we built hot wire anemometers for the flow industry where each of these sensors used two wire wound resistance temperature detectors (RTDs). Subsequently, a year after, we started receiving enquiries from other companies to make different types of individual resistance temperature detectors, which allowed us to expand our manufacturing types to meet the new requests and reach greater heights,” explains O’Brien.



Four decades later and going strong, Temperature Specialists is a renowned temperature sensor manufacturer that is breaking new ground in designing sensors that completely align with the customer’s environment and specifications. The company has always focused on investing in state-of-the-art equipment and technology to meet all aspects of manufacturing customized temperature and flow sensors. “We strive to equip assemblers with outstanding tools that include better optical components, welding equipment, resistance spot welding, and laser and plasma welding devices,” elaborates O’Brien. The new styles of welding open up novel methods of assembly that allow designers to develop innovative sensors. The company’s robust product portfolio includes temperature sensors, RTDs, thermocouples, wire wound RTD sensors, and thermistors that can be customized to customer specifications.

Crafting Custom-Designed Models

Although the industrial sensors market is expected to be valued at $21.6 billion by 2023, there are manifold challenges that organizations face. Especially, in the temperature sensors market, the manufacturers often sell poor quality assemblies built using low-cost foreign parts with questionable reliability. Adding to the woes, a majority of the traditional sensor devices aren’t adaptable to different environments, which impacts the accuracy of temperature measurements in those environments. “Our goal is to design sensors tailored to our customers’ unique applications of measuring temperature or flow as opposed to just selling standard sensors,” emphasizes O’Brien.

The team at Temperature Specialists doesn’t believe in the quick and easy way of building sensors where most manufacturers bypass several steps internally in their manufacturing process.

“We believe in developing durable products for our customers. Our sensors have an extremely long lifespan, which enables customers to use them without having to replace it frequently. Reliability and longevity are our hallmarks,” states O’Brien.
Prior to designing a sensor, the team takes into account all the parameters that go into defining the customer’s requirements. An engineer or a purchasing agent from the customer’s side first presents an initial idea of the sensor and a blueprint of the complete system in which they want to deploy the sensor. Temperature Specialists’ highly skilled team learns the exact customer requirements in terms of the measurements of the sensor and the part of the system where the sensor will be deployed to achieve temperature accuracy. For example, a layman would think that a quick and easy way of monitoring the temperature in an oven would be to mount a sensor on the inside wall of the chamber. However, there are a lot of factors that need to be considered, from the style of the oven to how it is heated. Is it by a heater located inside the oven or one present at the bottom like in a standard home oven, or is there an infrared heat source? All of these heat sources bring up many questions that need to be evaluated to get the best measurement result.

At Temperature Specialists, the expert team has formulated predefined questions for their customers that help them to deliver suitable sensors with accurate measurement. How fast is the temperature changing in the chamber and does that need to be detected? Do they want an average temperature of the chamber? Where is the sensor going to be located in relation to the heat source?



According to O’Brien, typically, in a convection oven with circulating air, if the sensor is located too close to the flow, the oven may respond to the temperature changes quickly allowing the heater to turn on and off rapidly. Subsequently, the temperature in other locations within the chamber may not rise to the desired temperature. On the flip side, if the sensor reacts too slowly to the temperature change, then there is a possibility of oven temperature overshooting the set point and resulting in big swings in the temperature within the chamber. “With our standard of manufacturing, we have a better ability to meet the customers’ expectations and help them achieve the ideal outcome for their temperature and flow measurements,” affirms O’Brien. While designing these types of sensors, the designer must steer away from a one-size-fits-all approach. “If they just focus on a single type of sensor design, they may not always come up with the best design,” remarks O’Brien.