The problem we set out to solve
When a gas furnace quits, the first person to know is usually the homeowner — and only because the house got cold. The thermostat still reads “heating.” Nothing looks wrong. By the time the call reaches a service company, it’s an emergency: an unhappy customer, a truck rolling without a diagnosis, and a technician starting from scratch in the driveway.
The frustrating part is that the furnace was telling the whole story all along — the heat call that went unanswered, the inducer that never spun up, the burner that lit and dropped out. Nobody was listening.
What we built
FurnaceWatch is a sensor that a service technician mounts on the furnace during a normal maintenance visit. It powers from the furnace’s own 24V transformer, senses the heat call from the thermostat wires, and follows every heating cycle — inducer, ignition, blower — around the clock.
When a cycle goes wrong, the failure gets a name: heat call with no ignition, igniter failure, flame sensor failure, a pressure switch or rollout trip, short cycling. Your office gets a push notification with the failure mode and the timeline, and the portal shows every furnace under agreement in one list.
Detection runs on the sensor itself, so a Wi-Fi drop at the home never means an unwatched furnace.
Where we are
We’ve been building quietly for a while: the hardware, the on-device detection — validated on instrumented furnaces, with wider validation underway — and the fleet portal your office and your customers log into.
This heating season we’re enrolling a small number of HVAC service companies as design partners: real maintenance-agreement fleets, honest feedback, and a direct line to the person building the product.
If you run a residential service company and you’re tired of learning about failures from cold customers, request a demo. We’ll show you the sensor, the portal, and what an alert looks like on your dispatcher’s phone.