How Caretaker Pulse works
The mechanism, end to end: what the sensors measure, how every heating and cooling cycle is graded, and why each alert arrives pre-triaged with the evidence attached.
Wireless nodes, a palm-sized hub, ten minutes
Wireless sensor nodes with a multi-year battery, plus a palm-sized hub at the unit. No smart thermostat required. About ten minutes, during any visit, by any tech, with a guided system profile in the same app.
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.
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 and no-heat / no-cool — are armed from day one. Everything else stays quiet until it knows what healthy looks like for that house.
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
- Dual-fuel faults: both sources firing, failed handoff, expensive fuel running when the cheap one should, or one source that has quietly stopped running altogether
- Dead electric heat element or sequencer stage
- Blower over-current
- A thermostat chattering, or a call that never releases
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
- 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.
- Humidity & indoor-air-quality guidance
- Duct-sealing decisions backed by measurements, not guesses
Scenarios are illustrative.
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. Outside the safety paths — water at the drain pan, a system that isn't heating or cooling at all — one kind of evidence on its own stays at Phone‑Fix or below: a Truck‑Roll takes two independent kinds agreeing, or a problem that keeps coming back. The diagnostic engine explains and ranks causes on demand; it can never invent a fault or upgrade urgency.
Honest about its own blind spots
If the hub goes dark, Pulse says it has lost sight of the system and what to check — it never turns that silence into an HVAC fault or a truck roll. A sensor that goes quiet is flagged as a sensor problem, never as an HVAC fault.
It reads the system the way a sharp tech does
Pulse reads the whole system from the outside — temperatures, airflow, static pressure, current draw, runtime — and infers what's happening inside, the way a sharp tech does: it sees the symptom pattern, rules out the look-alikes, and hands over a ranked diagnosis with the evidence behind it. We don't put gauges on the lines — we catch the symptom and hand your technician the evidence to confirm it on site.
The technical questions
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?
Pulse says so, plainly. A silent hub is reported as lost contact, with the likely causes — Wi-Fi, the router, the hub's power — for your team to check. It is never passed off as an HVAC diagnosis and never rolls a truck.
What about sensor batteries?
The sensor nodes run on a multi-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 your team, never a fake HVAC alarm.
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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