Sensor technology continues to develop — separately. Two parallel markets exist in the sensor market: industrial and residential. While some of these sensors are similar in nature, there is little overlap between the two markets. Sensors for industry focus on optimizing manufacturing and production operations, while residential sensors are normally for increasing security or comfort for people. Because these sensors serve different purposes, they have different design criteria.
Sensors are used to measure many physical quantities, such as temperature, pressure, level, flow rate, humidity and so on. In reality, all of these sensors translate a physical quantity into an electrical voltage or current. For example, a common temperature measuring sensor (thermocouple) outputs a small voltage that responds linearly with a temperature change due to the Seebeck Effect. Regardless of the physics of the sensor, the output voltage or current must be calibrated against a physical quantity to make sense of the signal.
For the most part, sensors developed for the residential market are buried inside of consumer goods. They are often unserviceable by the average homeowner, and the entire device is discarded or a skilled technician performs the repair or replacement. For example, If the thermocouple on a hot water heater fails, the homeowner calls a technician to troubleshoot and replace the thermocouple. Because the device is replaced with a nearly identical thermocouple, little recalibration is needed.
In contrast, an industrial sensor may need to be reconfigured for one application or another. Suppose the temperature of a process must be measured farther away than originally planned. Longer wires are required, which means the voltage will be different at the end of this thermocouple. While the home hot water heater simply heats water to a “warm” temperature, a thermocouple that regulates the temperature of a coolant for a delicate chemical process requires much more setup and care. These little details mean that an industrial control system requires a different set of sensors and computing power.
Speaking of computing power, the average residential sensor works alone or perhaps with just a few other sensors. Most home thermostats have only one temperature sensor. Contrast this with a modern, industrial semiconductor lithography scanner that must monitor temperature in thirty places and integrate that data with hundreds of rotational speed, vibration, flow, current, light, moisture, level and pressure sensors.
Industrial sensors are more robust, servicing any number of configurations and applications. Residential sensors are normally used for one purpose and are model-specific. While industrial sensors are standardized, there are many more applicable standards and applications than for residential sensors. The temperature sensor in a home thermostat is really only used for home thermostats, whereas an industrial temperature sensor may be used in an unlimited number of manufacturing environments. The same sensor may be used to control the curing furnace for epoxy in a composite panel manufacturing plant, or to ensure food processing equipment is at a high enough temperature to kill bacteria. Furthermore, throughout a sensor’s life, it may perform one task, then be reconfigured to perform another as market demands and process changes evolve.
The reconfigurability of industrial systems means that sensors must be able to integrate with a variety of 
Ladder logic, such as this, is not difficult to learn, but it is more than the average homeowner wants to configure and troubleshoot. Source: Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0protocols and standards for communication, data collection and control purposes. While residential sensor feedback is often permanently coded into a microcontroller, industrial sensors feed back into different control systems, requiring the installer to also be a programmer. When a new industrial sensor is installed, it is integrated into an existing coding network, be it NI LabVIEW, C++, Ladder Logic for programmable logic controllers or many other platforms.
Another major difference is the reliability and ruggedness of industrial sensors as compared to residential sensors. This extra ruggedness is often accompanied by traceability and thus a higher cost. Industrial sensors are often traceable to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), due to the sensitivity and accuracy that is required for these applications.
The traceability is necessary for determining liability. Suppose a batch of tainted milk leaves an industrial dairy, and customers have become ill. Perhaps the dairy did not follow protocol and might be at fault, or perhaps a particular sensor was reporting an incorrect value. Sensors used in this type of environment may be equipped with traceable standards that can be verified and retested to determine fault, and thus legal liability.
While residential products are found at fault, leading to class-action lawsuits against the manufacturers, the damages caused by these faults are typically isolated. If a refrigerator compressor pressure sensor fails and the compressor catches fire, there is a recall effort and a class-action suit. If a compressor pressure sensor fails at a chemical plant, there may be a massive explosion, with a class-action lawsuit from workers and the surrounding property owners, as well as governmental legal battles from the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and other federal, state and local agencies.
During a lawsuit investigation or for troubleshooting of a process, industrial sensor data is reviewed, indicating the need to archive, calibrate and review such data; residential data is rarely archived. Data from an industrial sensor may be reviewed to discover trends in production or develop maintenance schedules for equipment. It may be very important to know the temperature of a particular sensor, sampled every second, six months ago. In the residential environment, it is rare to need that sort of data storage; nobody wonders what their living room temperature was last summer or the summer before.
Even though some of these sensors used in residential and industrial applications are similar electrically, they serve two totally different markets. The sensors themselves may not differ wildly in that sensors from both markets produce a voltage or current output for monitoring and control. However, the data they produce, the computing power and skill required for use, the traceability recommended for legal purposes, and the lifetime of the data collected mean that the sensors will be used in entirely different ways between the home and the manufacturing plant.
