Abstract. Supermarkets lose millions of pounds every year through lost trading and stock wastage caused by the failure of refrigerated cabinets. Therefore, a huge commercial market exists for artificially intelligent systems which are able to detect the early symptoms of faults. Previous work in this vein, using real-world data and now in the throes of being deployed commercially, has employed evolved neural networks to predict volumes of temperature and other alarms emerging from refrigeration system controllers, and also to predict likely refrigerant gas loss from such alarm patterns. In this work we turn to the use of in-cabinet temperature data which has recently become available, and the aim is to predict refrigeration system faults from the pattern of in-cabinet temperature over time. We argue that artificial immune system inspired technologies are particularly appropriate for this task. The negative selection algorithm is therefore investigated as a tool to detect anomalous patterns in temperature data. Using a simple AIS system in preliminary experiments to assess feasibility, we compare the performance of a simple matching rule based on Euclidean distance and one using traditional r contiguous bits matching. We also investigate a 'differential' encoding scheme which reduces the size of pattern space while retaining what we feel to be the essential elements of patterns in this application. We find that feasibility for AIS in this application is proven, with particularly good selfdetection rates, and a fault-detection rate adequate as a springboard for further development. The best AIS configuration of those examined here seems to be that which uses the novel differential encoding in conjunction with the r-bits matching rule. The differential encoding scheme is simple, yet seems powerfully suited to such time series pattern analysis tasks.