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 10-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, no-heat, power loss — 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
  • 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.

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?

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.

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.

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 a live fleet board.

Goes straight to the founder. Or email contact@caretakerlabs.com