For HVAC service companies · Naming our founding partners in New England now
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.
Tell us about your shop — you'll hear directly from the founder within a day. The demo is 15 minutes on the real fleet board.
or email contact@caretakerlabs.com
- ~10‑minute install
- Multi‑year sensor batteries
- Any forced‑air system — gas, oil, propane, electric, heat pump, dual‑fuel
- Your brand on the homeowner's app
Scenarios are illustrative.
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.
How that plays out
- 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.
How that plays out
- Senior triages from the office in minutes; the junior arrives with suspected causes ranked and parts listed.
- First visits become fix visits — and the system shows whether the fix took.
- 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 — outside the safety paths, one kind of evidence seen once never rolls a truck — so dispatch can trust it like a departures board.
How that plays out
- 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.
- Thermostat chattering on and off → Phone‑Fix: settings and batteries first — a replacement thermostat and common-wire kit are already on the list if the call doesn't fix it.
- 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.
How that plays out
- 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.
- Hub goes dark: Pulse says plainly that it has lost sight of the system and lists what to check — Wi-Fi, the router, the hub's power. It never turns silence into a diagnosis or a truck roll.
- Water at the unit: drain-pan contact closes → alert in seconds, with safe guidance for the homeowner.
Scenarios are illustrative.
~75%
of AC systems run with improper refrigerant charge or airflow, per field studies — invisible until the bill or the breakdown
$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
How it works
Installed in minutes. Quiet until it knows the system.
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1
Install during any visit
Wireless sensor nodes with a multi-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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2
It learns before it speaks
Pulse baselines each system's own normal, per operating mode, before it ever grades a cycle. Safety paths — water leak and no-heat / no-cool — are armed from day one.
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3
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.
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
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
- A thermostat chattering, or a call that never releases
- Dual‑fuel faults: both sources firing, failed handoff, or one source that has quietly stopped running altogether
Wear & maintenance
days
- Filter loading, with days-to-clog projection
- High static pressure / airflow restriction
- High indoor humidity
Planning & advice
seasonal
- A sizing verdict per operating mode, from the home's own runtime against its own weather — “on the warmest day observed your 4‑ton ran 58% of the day; in mild weather it starts nine times a day for seven minutes” — with an indicative cooling tonnage for your Manual J to confirm. A consult for the replacement conversation, never an alert.
- Duct-sealing decisions backed by measurements, not guesses
Scenarios are illustrative.
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, and the full cycle and event history — under one banner that says what's wrong and how urgent.
- The diagnostics tray — 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.
- Sizing consult — an over/under-sizing verdict per operating mode, with the home's own runtime against its own weather. A consult card, never an alert.
- Escalation on the hard ones — when a technician's deep‑dive comes back emergency‑grade, the full summary is emailed to your escalation contact (or every admin on your account) automatically: site, severity, likely causes, remedies, and a link straight to the site.
- 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.
- What their system is doing right now — heating, cooling, or idle, with the indoor and outdoor temperature beside it.
- A twelve-hour temperature history — how their home has been keeping up, in one glance.
- A plain heads‑up when something needs attention — named in a few words, never an error code.
- One button: notify my service company — with a one‑tap reason; the site lights up on your board.
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 — like a furnace quietly carrying the load for weeks while the heat pump sits dead.
Real winters
The no-heat and leak watch is armed from day one and tuned per fuel — because a January morning is no time to be learning.
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
We haven't published numbers yet — founding-partner pricing is being set with the first cohort. Ask, and we'll tell you within a day.
Get founding-partner pricingFAQ
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. Near-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 multi-year battery; the compact hub mounts right at the unit. Start with your best 20 service-plan customers.
Whose brand does the customer see?
Yours. The homeowner app carries your company's brand — Caretaker Labs stays in the background.
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.
Why I built Pulse
I've lived with HVAC systems old and new that broke down whenever they felt like it. They'd ping-pong between working fine and acting up — while a parade of good technicians tried to catch the system in the act. That was painful for me, and just as painful for the service companies sending techs out to chase a moving target. What everyone was missing was a continuous finger on the system's pulse. So I built one.
— Arvind, founder, Caretaker Labs
Winter is when customers decide who their HVAC company is.
Be the company that calls first. We're naming a handful of founding shops for this winter — a point person on your side, your best twenty plan customers to start, and fifteen minutes with the founder every two weeks through the heating season.
Get started
Become a founding partner
Tell us about your shop — you'll hear directly from the founder within a day. The demo is 15 minutes on the real fleet board.
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