What it detects
Twelve measurements. A dozen things worth knowing.
None of these needs extra hardware. They all fall out of readings the sensor takes anyway, every three seconds.
Party detection
A party has a signature. Two people watching television doesn't.
A single loud noise isn't a party — it's a dropped suitcase. What matters is the pattern, and the sensor watches four things at once so you're not woken by a false alarm.
Radar reports multiple moving targets. CO₂ 1,840 ppm, rising. Notification sent to duty manager 23:47.
- Sound level — sustained above your threshold, not one spike
- Occupancy — radar sees several moving targets, not one
- CO₂ — climbs fast and hard when a room holds far more people than it was let to
- Time of night — your quiet hours, your rules
CO₂ is the one operators don't expect and end up relying on most. A room booked for two, holding fifteen, gives itself away in the air long before it gets loud — which buys you the chance to make a quiet phone call instead of arriving to a problem.
Smoking and vaping
The £250 cleaning fee you currently never collect.
Almost every operator has a no-smoking policy and a fee attached to it. Almost none of them ever charge it, because by the time housekeeping smells the room the guest has checked out and the argument is unwinnable.
Smoking and vaping both produce a sharp, unmistakable signature: volatile compounds and airborne particulates spiking together, then decaying slowly over twenty minutes. A shower doesn't look like that. Nor does aftershave, or a takeaway.
You find out at 21:14, not at 11:00 the next morning. Which means a polite phone call while the guest is still in the building, and a fee raised against a timestamped record rather than a housekeeper's word.
Intruder detection · unoccupied rooms
Nobody is booked into 214. Somebody is in it.
Every operator has rooms standing empty — taken off sale, waiting for a repair, turned over between lets, or a whole property sitting vacant for a fortnight. Nobody looks at them. That is exactly why they're the ones worth watching, and why an empty room is the easiest place in the building to detect somebody who shouldn't be there.
Tell Pulse which rooms are supposed to be empty, and presence in one of them becomes an alert rather than a reading. It works in the dark, through a closed door, and picks up someone lying still — because it's radar, not a motion detector and not a camera.
What it actually catches: a guest who checked out yesterday and came back, a key handed to somebody it shouldn't have been, a contractor in a room at 23:00, a door left on the latch, someone sleeping in a unit between lets. For a host managing a property eighty miles away, that's the difference between finding out now and finding out at the next changeover.
It's the same radar doing the same job as everywhere else on this page. You're simply inverting the question: instead of "is anyone here, so I can save energy", it's "is anyone here, because there shouldn't be".
It tells you someone is there, not who. A guest, a cleaner, a contractor and an intruder all look identical to a radar. Always read it against your bookings and your rota before you act on it — and never treat it as identification.
This is the one feature siting can ruin. 24 GHz radar reads through plasterboard. Mount a unit badly against a stud partition and it will report your neighbour's room as an intrusion. Gate the detection distance at commissioning; it takes a minute per room and it is not optional for this use.
It is not a security system. Pulse isn't a graded intruder alarm, it doesn't summon anybody, and it isn't monitored. It's an alert to your phone. Also worth knowing: if you point it at staff movements rather than empty rooms, that becomes employee monitoring under UK GDPR and needs an assessment first.
Five rooms behaving. One that isn't. The board only ever asks you to look at the exception — which is the only way a hundred rooms stays manageable.
Rate of temperature rise
A room getting hot fast, in a building where nobody is looking.
A smoke alarm waits for smoke to reach the ceiling and enter the chamber. Temperature starts moving earlier — and Pulse reads the room every three seconds, so it sees the gradient, not just the value.
A room climbing 6 °C in four minutes with nobody in it is not a warm afternoon. Neither is a vacant room at 2 am rising steadily. You get told, with a room number, while it is still a question rather than an evacuation.
The practical value is in the rooms nobody enters for days: out-of-service rooms, plant cupboards, void units between lets, a laundry room with a tumble dryer in it.
What it is: a supplementary operational alert that may reach you before a certified system triggers. Treat it as extra warning on top of a compliant system — never as a reason to fit fewer alarms.
Damp and water damage
The leak you find in August started in March.
The expensive water damage in a let property is almost never the dramatic kind. It's the slow kind — an extractor fan that stopped working, a shower seal that went, a pipe weeping inside a wall — quietly turning a room into a mould problem across a whole season.
Pulse watches humidity and temperature continuously and tells you when a room stops drying out. A bathroom that hits 85% after a shower is normal. A bedroom sitting above 70% for three days in a row is not, and it will be a redecoration bill by the autumn.
You get told in March. A £40 fan, instead of a stripped wall, a replastering job and three weeks of a room you can't sell.
Nine more things the same box tells you
Most of these only became obvious once operators had one running.
None of them needs extra hardware. They fall out of measurements the sensor is taking anyway.
A real clean has a signature: someone in the room for twenty minutes, dust lifted into the air, cleaning products in the volatile reading. No signature between two bookings means nobody cleaned it. If you manage remotely and pay a cleaner you never see, this one alone justifies the sensor.
Pulse commands the unit and then watches whether the room actually responds. Cooling called for, temperature flat for thirty minutes — the unit is broken. You know on Tuesday instead of finding out through a Saturday complaint and a refunded night.
Humidity spikes after a shower and then doesn't come back down. The fan has died, months before the damp shows on a wall.
A vacant unit dropping towards freezing in January. The cheapest water damage is the kind that never happens.
Heating running hard while the room refuses to warm. Money leaving through a sash window.
Light level high, nobody present, for hours. Small money on one room, real money across a hundred.
Housekeeping stops knocking on occupied doors. Rooms get turned in the order they're actually available.
A room let to two, slept in by six. The air says so within an hour, long before the party rule would ever fire.
Across a hundred rooms, patterns surface that no individual complaint reveals: the four rooms that never get below 24 °C in summer, the two beside the lift that run 8 dBA louder all night, the one that sits at 68% humidity year-round. That's a capital plan built on measurements rather than on which guest shouted loudest.
A sealed room with two people in it climbs past 1,500 ppm by 3 am. Guests rarely blame the air — they write "didn't sleep well" and give you four stars. Ventilate on a threshold and the complaint stops arriving.
One device
Twelve measurements, updated every few seconds.
No camera. No microphone recording. Nothing with a lens and nothing with a memory of anyone's voice.
Loudness only. The measurement your party rule runs on, and the one that cannot be turned back into speech.
Detects a still, breathing person in the dark. No lens, no image.
Tells a person in the room from movement in the corridor.
Comfort complaints, and frost risk in an empty property.
The damp early-warning trace. Your most valuable long-run reading.
How many people are really in the room, and whether the ventilation is coping. Rises fast during an overcrowded party and stays flat during a quiet evening.
A single overall figure for how the room's air is doing.
Aerosols, solvents, cleaning products — and stale, unaired rooms.
Smoke and dust, on units fitted with the particle module.
Lights left burning in a room nobody is in.
Weather context for the heating and cooling logic.
Separates one slammed door from a sustained disturbance.
Controls the air conditioning and television you already own, and learns their codes from your existing remote in one pass.
Availability
Coming soon.
Pulse is in final testing ahead of its first hundred-room rollout. Leave your details and we'll be in touch when units are available — with a live dashboard, a walk through exactly what is and isn't captured, and a rollout costed against the numbers you put in above.