For HVAC service companies · Founding partners onboarding now in New England
Super‑powers for your technicians.
Meet Caretaker Pulse — round‑the‑clock HVAC monitoring and diagnostics from Caretaker Labs.
Pulse turns every furnace, AC, and heat pump you service into a system that reports its own health — wireless sensors and a palm-sized hub that track every heating and cooling cycle, catch problems while they're still small, and tell your team what's wrong, how urgent it is, and what parts to bring before anyone gets in a truck.
- ~10‑minute install
- 10‑year sensor batteries
- Any forced‑air system — gas, oil, propane, electric, heat pump, dual‑fuel
- No smart equipment required
- Your brand on the homeowner's app
~75%
of AC systems run with improper refrigerant charge or airflow, per field studies — invisible until the bill or the breakdown
20–30%
of conditioned air is typically lost to duct leaks (ENERGY STAR)
$1,500–$3,000
the compressor that unchecked short-cycling destroys — a failure that's detectable weeks before it happens
>$10,000
average interior water-damage claim (insurance-industry data). A monitored drain pan beats a remodel
Caretaker Pulse doesn't just detect a problem —
it tells you what's wrong, how urgent it is, and what to do about it.
Around the clock, Pulse takes each system's vital signs — temperature split, airflow, static pressure, current draw, humidity, runtime — runs the workup, and keeps the chart. By the time anyone knocks on the door, the diagnosis is written, the look-alikes are ruled out, and the right parts are already on the truck.
How it works
Installed in minutes. Quiet until it knows the system.
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Install during any visit
Wireless sensor nodes with a 10-year battery, plus a palm-sized hub at the unit. No smart thermostat required. About ten minutes, by any tech, with a guided system profile in the same app.
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It learns before it speaks
Caretaker Pulse baselines each system's own normal, per operating mode, before it ever grades a cycle. Safety paths — water leak, no-heat, power loss — are armed from day one. Everything else stays quiet until it knows what healthy looks like for that house.
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Your team gets answers, not alarms
One problem is one alert — pre-triaged Can‑Wait / Phone‑Fix / Truck‑Roll, with the evidence behind it, likely causes ranked, causes already ruled out, and a parts-and-tools list loaded before the truck leaves.
Why shops adopt it
Four ways it makes you the company customers keep
Give your service plan a pulse
A maintenance plan the customer hears from twice a year is easy to forget. A monitored plan is working every day — and the customer can see it working, right on their phone.
- Your existing service plan, souped up: round-the-clock monitoring, and a call from you before a small problem becomes a big one.
- Stay genuinely useful all year — timely filter reminders, humidity guidance, and replacement advice grounded in that home's actual runtime, not guesswork.
- A plan customers can watch working earns its own renewal — and the kind of trust that makes you their first call for everything that follows.
Put your best tech on every job — without the mileage
Your senior tech's judgment is your scarcest asset. Caretaker Pulse gives them a remote diagnostic bench: full cycle history, temperature-split trends, static pressure, current draw — and what was already ruled out, and why.
- Senior triages from the office in minutes; the junior arrives with suspected causes ranked and parts listed.
- First visits become fix visits. Callbacks drop, because the system verifies the fix took — and shows it.
- An on-demand expert-system deep-dive ranks likely causes and what to test first, for the hard ones. Triage itself stays deterministic — computed from evidence, never invented.
Phone-fixes in minutes. Truck rolls that arrive ready.
Every alert arrives pre-triaged — Can‑Wait / Phone‑Fix / Truck‑Roll, with urgent flags. When a phone call solves it, the customer gets help in minutes instead of waiting on a visit — and when a visit is the answer, the truck arrives with the right parts on board. The triage is deterministic, computed from the evidence, so dispatch can trust it like a departures board.
- Filter trending toward clogged → no scramble: the size is already on file, the heads-up goes out early, and a fresh filter is in place before it ever matters — with your name on the save.
- Breaker tripped in a cold snap → the system tells power loss apart from a Wi-Fi outage. “Check the breaker” is a two-minute call.
- Resident says the heat's not working, every thermostat wire is idle → “no call signal — thermostat suspect.” Batteries, not a truck.
Own the winter emergency
A no-heat call at 6 a.m. in January is the moment a customer decides who their HVAC company is for the next decade. Caretaker Pulse arms its safety paths from day one — they don't wait for calibration.
- No-heat: heat called but none coming → alert within 1–2 cycles, tuned per fuel. Oil burners get oil-burner timing — no false alarms on a normal slow start.
- Power loss: hub goes silent mid-cold-snap with strong signal history → “check the breaker” in about five minutes.
- Water at the unit: drain-pan contact closes → alert in seconds, with safe guidance for the homeowner.
What it catches
Emergencies in minutes. Breakdowns weeks before they happen.
Fourteen families of faults — from water at the unit to a filter quietly loading up — each graded against that system's own learned baseline.
Emergencies
minutes
- Water / condensate leak at the unit
- No-heat / no-cool total non-response
- Power loss vs. internet outage — told apart automatically
- Sensor / monitoring degradation
Failures
hours to a day
- Weak heating or cooling — low temp-split, weather-normalized
- Short-cycling
- Stuck reversing valve / miswired O‑B — heating when told to cool
- Dual-fuel faults: both sources firing, failed handoff, expensive fuel running when the cheap one should
- Dead electric heat element or sequencer stage
- Blower over-current
Wear & maintenance
days
- Filter loading, with days-to-clog projection
- High static pressure / airflow restriction
- Suspected duct disconnection
- High indoor humidity
- Poor dehumidification — AC cools but doesn't dry
Planning & advice
seasonal
- Right-sizing a replacement from real runtime — “your 4-ton ran 60% on the hottest day; a 3-ton fits”
- Humidity & indoor-air-quality guidance
- Duct-sealing decisions backed by measurements, not guesses
The credibility promise: it's deliberately quiet
Learns before it alerts
Each system is graded against its own baseline, per operating mode — never a generic threshold.
One problem, one alert
A chronic short-cycler is one sticky alert that resolves when the data says it's fixed — never fifty notifications.
Confounders discounted
Defrost cycles, backup heat, and brutal weather are recognized and excluded — not alarmed on.
Deterministic triage
Urgency is computed from the evidence. The diagnostic engine explains and ranks causes on demand — it can never invent a fault or upgrade urgency.
What your team gets
An ops console for your office. Your brand on the homeowner's phone.
The operations console
Dark, dense, built like a network operations center for HVAC.
- Fleet triage board — every contracted home on one screen: triage chips, urgent flags sorted to the top, live heating/cooling state, the named issue.
- Site deep-dive — live supply/return/outdoor temps on mode-colored charts, signed temperature split, a real-time thermostat wire monitor, full event timeline, composite health score.
- The diagnostic card — findings with the evidence window behind them, ranked causes with confidence, causes ruled out and why, what to test first, and an on-demand expert-system deep-dive.
- Arrive-prepared panel — deterministic parts and tools list per alert, loaded before the truck leaves.
- Install in the field — guided system profile in the same app; ~10 minutes during any visit, by any tech.
The homeowner app — your brand on it
It carries your company's brand, so the name on the customer's phone every day is yours — and what your customers open is one more service from the company they already know and trust, not another gadget brand asking for an account.
- Simple health status — Good / Fair / Poor, not error codes.
- A live chart of their own system — peace of mind they can see working.
- Plain-English notices — “your filter is filling up faster than expected.”
- One button: notify my service company — with a one-tap reason, straight to your dispatch.
Same evidence, two audiences. The tech's view and the homeowner's view draw from the same live data — what your team diagnoses remotely is exactly what you can show the customer at their kitchen table. That symmetry is the trust engine: every recommendation defensible, every visit documented, every fix verified.
Built for New England
Oil burners, heat pumps, and real winters are the home turf
Oil country
The Northeast burns roughly 80% of U.S. home heating oil (EIA). Pulse knows oil burners start slow — pre-purge and warm-up are timed in, so a normal oil start never false-alarms.
The heat-pump wave
Maine hit its 100,000-heat-pump goal two years early — and every conversion creates dual-fuel setups that are harder to diagnose by ear. Pulse natively understands heat pumps, backup heat, defrost, and the changeover handoff — including the faults that hide.
Real winters
The no-heat, power-loss, and leak watch is armed from day one and tuned per fuel — because a January morning is no time to be learning.
For homeowners
What a monitored service plan means for your home
If your heating & cooling company offers Caretaker Pulse with their service plan, here's what you get out of it.
- Problems caught small. Most breakdowns give off warning signs days or weeks ahead. Monitoring catches the drift early, so a “sudden” failure becomes a planned repair on a normal day — instead of an emergency.
- Watched on the coldest nights. If your heat is called for and none is coming, your service company can know within a cycle or two — often before you're out of bed.
- Honest answers, backed by your own home. When your technician recommends a repair — or tells you one can safely wait — they can show you the reason on a chart of your own system. No “just take our word for it.”
- Repairs that prove themselves. After a fix, you can watch your system's health climb back to Good in the app. You don't have to wonder whether it worked — you can see it.
- Nothing new to learn, nothing to replace. It works with the system and thermostat you already have, whatever the brand or age — installed in about ten minutes during a regular visit.
Monitoring never means less attention — it means more attention, earlier: eyes on your system between visits, a call before a small problem becomes a big one, and “it can wait” said out loud when that's the honest answer.
Ask your heating & cooling company about a monitored service plan — or ask us and we'll point you the right way.
5:40 a.m., 9 °F
A monitored home's heating goes quiet in the night. The on-call technician sees it and calls before the family is out of bed — a tripped breaker, reset in two minutes. No frozen pipes, no cold morning.
The puddle that never happened
An AC drain line clogs and water reaches the pan. The sensor catches it in seconds. The average interior water-damage claim runs over $10,000 (insurance-industry data) — this one ended with a shop vac and a cleared drain.
The filter phone call
“Your filter's loading up faster than usual — it'll want changing in about two weeks. Want us to drop one off, or will you grab one? It's the 16×25×1.”
Scenarios are illustrative.
Pricing
Simple enough to disappear into your service plan
Low-cost sensor kits + a small monthly per-site fee
Designed to fold neatly into the service plans you already offer.
- Introductory founding-partner pricing — early partners start low and help shape the roadmap
- No long contracts · no per-seat software licensing · no rip-and-replace
- Not another CRM or scheduling platform to migrate to — it's the monitoring and diagnostics layer those suites don't have, and it works alongside a paper calendar or a full FSM stack equally well
FAQ
The questions every shop owner asks
Will my customers value monitoring?
They already value peace of mind — that's what a maintenance plan is. Monitoring makes the plan visibly work every day, and one winter-emergency save earns the renewal on its own.
Won't customers see this as just another way to sell them something?
The opposite. Every diagnosis and every recommendation arrives with the customer's own data behind it — you open the chart at the kitchen table instead of asking them to take your word. Transparency isn't a promise here; it's how the product works.
Is this another gadget that false-alarms?
No. It's silent until it has learned the specific system, corroborates before alerting, and sends one alert per problem. Zero-false-alarm discipline is the core engineering requirement — false alarms burn your customers' trust, and the engine is built around that fact.
We're too busy to install these.
Ten minutes, during visits you're already making. The sensor nodes are wireless, with a 10-year battery; the compact hub mounts right at the unit. Start with your best 20 service-plan customers.
Does it work on oil / heat pumps / dual-fuel?
Yes — natively. Fuel-specific timing (oil burners get oil-burner clocks), defrost-aware, changeover-aware. That's the point: it handles the systems that are hardest to diagnose remotely, including faults that hide — like a furnace silently covering for a dead heat pump.
What if the internet goes out?
The system tells you whether the house lost power or just the Wi-Fi — that distinction is itself one of the most valuable alerts in winter. Power loss reads as “check the breaker”; a Wi-Fi outage never rolls a truck.
Whose brand does the customer see?
Yours. The homeowner app carries your company's brand — Caretaker Labs stays in the background.
What about sensor batteries?
The sensor nodes run on a 10-year battery — no charging, no annual battery swaps. And the system watches its own health too: a quiet sensor shows up as a monitoring flag for the next visit, never a fake HVAC alarm.
Who sees my customers' data?
Homeowners see only their own home, in plain language; your team sees only your contracted sites. The relationship — and the customer — stay yours.
Winter is when customers decide who their HVAC company is.
Be the company that calls before they're out of bed. Founding-partner slots are limited while we onboard our first New England shops.