For hotels and short-let properties

How smart is your building?

Every room, telling you what it's doing.

One discreet sensor per room. Temperature, air, noise, damp and occupancy — measured continuously, on one screen, for the whole building. It turns the air conditioning off when the room empties, and tells you about smoke, damp and disturbance while you can still do something about them.

Nothing in the room has a lens or a microphone recording. Guests are told it's there — a sensor you can put in the listing deters the booking you didn't want in the first place.

Room 214, 06:40. Guests read it as a smoke detector and stop noticing it by the end of the first evening — which is the point. Ceiling or high wall, USB-C power, no cabling.
Measures, every 3 seconds

Temperature · Humidity · CO₂ · Air quality index · Volatile compounds · Particulates · Sound level in dBA · Peak sound · Light level · Air pressure · Occupancy · Distance to person

Twelve readings from one box on one wall.

Warns you about

Parties and disturbance · Smoking and vaping · Damp and failed extractors · Someone in a room that should be empty · Rapid temperature rise · More guests than the booking · Rooms not cleaned · Air conditioning that has failed · Stuffy rooms costing you reviews · Windows open with the heating on · Frost risk in empty units · Lights left burning

Does, on its own

Switches the air conditioning and television off five minutes after a room empties, and restores them the moment anyone returns · Learns the codes from your existing remotes · Sends alerts by WhatsApp, SMS or email on thresholds you set · Keeps a timestamped history for deposit and insurance disputes

Never does

No camera and no image of any kind · No audio recorded, streamed or stored · Sound is a loudness number, so speech cannot be reconstructed from it · Presence is radar, so it works in the dark with no lens · It can tell you somebody is there, never who

Live · the real dashboard

Pick a situation. Watch the room react.

This is the actual room view, running here in the page. Every scenario below is one the sensor detects with no extra hardware — and the numbers move the way they really move.

Room 101
Detected Connected
Temperature
21.5 °C
Humidity
44%
CO₂
611 ppm
Noise
34 dBA
Occupancy
Detected
Light
12 lx
Air quality
38
Pressure
1,019 hPa
Air quality
AQI
CO₂
Breath VOC
Particulates
Comfort
Temp
Humidity
Sound
Presence
In the room
Detected
Distance
212 cm
Movement
Detected
Still person
Detected
Controls
Air conditioning
On · 21 °C
Television
On

Values are representative rather than a live feed from a real room, and drift gently between readings the way the hardware actually reports. The particulate figures assume the optional particle module is fitted. Nothing shown here is derived from audio: the sound figure is a decibel level, and presence comes from radar.

How you actually find out

Nobody watches a dashboard. So it comes to you.

A screen that has to be checked gets checked for a fortnight and then never again. Every situation below arrives on a phone instead, worded so a duty manager can act on it without opening anything.

WhatsAppDuty managers
EmailOwner & maintenance
Fromalerts@pulsesensor.co.uk
Toyou@yourproperty.co.uk
Normal
Open the room
SMSOut of hours · no data needed
0/160 characters

Escalation is yours to set: which situations go to whom, at what hour, and how long a condition must hold before anybody is woken. Routine things — devices switched off, a room not cleaned — collect into a morning digest rather than pinging someone at 03:00.


Your building, your thresholds

You decide what is worth waking someone for.

A city-centre hotel and a rural cottage do not share a definition of "too loud". Every rule below is yours to set — the level, how long it has to hold, the hours it applies, and who hears about it. Change anything here and the plain-English line underneath updates with it.

Alert rules Pulse House · applies to all 24 rooms
Noise Escalates
Alert me when sound is above dBA for more than minutes, between :00 and :00.

Smoking or vaping Immediate
Alert me immediately when volatile compounds and particulates spike together — VOC above ppm and particulates above µg/m³.

Temperature rising fast Immediate
Alert me when the temperature rises more than °C in minute(s), and the room is unoccupied.

Presence in a vacant room Immediate
Alert me immediately when anyone is detected in a room marked vacant or out of service, closer than cm, for more than seconds.

Overcrowding Escalates
Alert me when CO₂ goes above ppm for more than minutes.

Damp Daily digest
Tell me when humidity stays above % for more than days.

Room not serviced Daily digest
Tell me when a room shows no cleaning signature within hours of checkout.

Switch devices off when empty Action
Switch the air conditioning and television off after the room has been clear for minutes. Restores automatically on return.

Rules can be set per property, per floor or per room — a room over the bins needs a different particulate threshold to one on the top floor. Anything marked daily digest collects into one morning message instead of interrupting the night.


12

separate measurements from one box on one wall

0

cameras, audio recordings or images — of any kind, ever

3 sec

between readings, which is what makes a rate of change visible

10 min

to fit one, with no cabling and no room taken out of service

Empty, and everything off. Radar confirms no movement and no still, breathing person — then the infrared emitter shuts the air conditioning and television down.
14:02 · Room 118
Guest leaves for the day. Air conditioning left at 18 °C. Television left on standby-defeating loop.
14:02 – 14:07
Radar confirms the room is genuinely empty — no movement, and no still, breathing person. A PIR would have given up the moment somebody sat still to read.
14:07
Five minutes clear. The sensor's infrared emitter fires the same codes as the room's own remote controls — air conditioning off, television off.
19:40
Door opens, radar picks the guest up immediately, air conditioning restored to their setting. They never know it was off.
Presence panel showing: in the room — detected; distance — 208 cm; movement — detected; still person — detected.
Why radar, not a motion sensor. "Still person — detected" is the line that matters. A PIR loses someone the moment they sit still; this doesn't, so the room only ever switches off when it is genuinely empty.
Controls panel showing TV power last used 11 minutes ago, and IR learn mode off.
The infrared side. The same box that measures the room also drives it.

The bit that pays for itself

An empty room heating itself for six hours.

Every operator knows it happens and nobody can police it. Key-card power switches were the old answer, and guests defeat them with a loyalty card in about four seconds.

Pulse has a built-in infrared emitter and learner. Point your existing remote at it once, and it can drive that unit forever after — the air conditioning, the television, anything with an infrared remote. No new air-conditioning system, no rewiring, no per-room electrician visit.

Empty for five minutes, everything off. Someone walks in, everything back. The delay is yours to set, and the rule only ever runs when the radar is certain the room is empty — which is exactly why a radar and not a motion detector.

It also learns the codes you already use, so a mixed estate of three different air-conditioning brands is not a problem.


The signature, not the smell. Volatile compounds and particulates rise together and decay over twenty minutes — a shape a shower or an aftershave never makes.
Room 214 · particulates and volatile compounds · 02/09/2026, 21:00 – 21:30
highclear 21:14 · inspection flagged 21:00 21:14 21:30
Volatile compounds Particulates Threshold crossed
Air quality gauges: AQI 72, CO₂ 583 ppm, breath VOC 0.68 ppm, particulates 8.4 µg/m³ — all reading in or near the green band.
The two gauges that catch it. Breath VOC and particulates, shown here on a clean room. A smoking event pushes both needles into the red together, then lets them fall back slowly — a shape nothing else in a bedroom produces.

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.

Be precise about what this proves. The sensor detects an aerosol event in the room — it does not chemically identify tobacco, cannabis or a vape, and we would not advise selling it as if it did. What it gives you is a reliable, timestamped trigger to inspect and to act. That is the difference between a fee you can raise and one you can't.

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.

Room 214 23:47
34dBA
Quiet — normal night-time level
20alert at 7090
Sustained above threshold — 11 minutes.
Radar reports multiple moving targets. CO₂ 1,840 ppm, rising. Notification sent to duty manager 23:47.
This is a number, not a recording. Nothing here can be played back.
  • 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.

Typical CO₂ after two hours in a sealed double room
alert · 1,400 ppm 2 guests 700 ppm 4 guests 1,150 ppm 8 guests 1,900 ppm 15 guests 2,900 ppm Indicative — 22 m³ room, window shut, ventilation off.
A party has a shape. Sustained level rather than a single spike, several moving targets, and CO₂ climbing hard as the room fills well past the booking.
22:10 · Room 214
36 dBA · 2 occupants · CO₂ 610 ppm. Normal. Nobody is notified.
23:02
One spike to 78 dBA, lasting 4 seconds. Ignored — a door, not a party.
23:36
71 dBA sustained. CO₂ passes 1,400 ppm. Radar reports multiple movers. Watch condition opened.
23:47
Eleven minutes sustained. Duty manager notified with the room number, the level and the trend. One phone call, before the neighbours ring reception.
00:20
42 dBA. Resolved. The whole night is logged with timestamps — which is what you need if a deposit claim follows.
Twenty-four hour history: an occupancy bar showing when the room was occupied and clear, above a sound level trace across the same period.
The evidence, not the anecdote. Occupancy and sound on the same 24-hour axis. When a guest disputes a noise charge, this is the screen you send them — and it contains no recording for anyone to demand.

The part your guests will ask about

There is no recording, because there is nothing to record.

A microphone captures a signal you could play back. This doesn't. The sensor's acoustic chip converts sound into a sound pressure level in decibels — a single number, a few times a minute — and the number is all that ever leaves the chip.

Compare the two side by side:

Speech cannot be reconstructed from a loudness figure, in the same way a photograph cannot be reconstructed from a light-meter reading. This is a property of the hardware, not a setting somebody could switch off.
Pulse — one number
23:46 34 dBA 23:47 71 dBA 23:48 73 dBA 23:49 69 dBA

That is the entire acoustic record. Four numbers a minute. There is no audio buffer, no stream, no file and no cloud microphone service — because the device never produces audio in the first place.

  • No voices, no words, no speaker identity
  • Nothing that can be replayed, because nothing was captured
  • Nothing that constitutes personal data on its own
  • Something you can state plainly in your listing and your key-card wallet

The same holds for occupancy. Presence is measured by 24 GHz radar — it detects a chest rising and falling through a duvet, in complete darkness, with no lens and no image of any kind.


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".

Three things to be straight about.

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.
Vacant on the chart, occupied in fact. The distance figure is what separates a real intrusion from a reading bleeding through a stud partition.
Floor 2 · expected state versus what the radar reports · 02/09/2026, 23:12
210
Booked · occupied
As expected
211
Booked · occupied
As expected
212
Vacant · clear
As expected
213
Out of service · clear
As expected
214
Vacant · presence detected
Check this room
215
Booked · arriving 18:00
As expected

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.

Presence panel: in the room — detected; distance — 208 cm; movement — detected; still person — detected.
Distance is the detail that makes this work. 208 cm puts the person inside the room rather than beyond the wall — which is how you gate out a false alarm from next door.

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.

This is not a fire alarm, and must never be sold as one. Pulse is not EN 54 certified, is not a heat or smoke detector, and is not a substitute for the fire detection and alarm system your premises is legally required to maintain under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. It must not appear in your fire risk assessment as detection provision, and it will not summon the fire service.

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.
Gradient, not temperature. A room nobody has entered for days, climbing 1.8 °C a minute. A supplementary alert — never a replacement for a certified fire system.
02:14 · Room 09, out of service
19.2 °C, unoccupied, stable for six hours. Nothing happening.
02:18
21.0 °C. Rising, but slowly. Below the gradient threshold — no alert. A warm night does this.
02:21
26.4 °C. Rate of rise 1.8 °C per minute in an empty room, with volatile compounds climbing alongside it. Alert raised.
02:22
Night porter has a room number and a reason to walk down there — before the ceiling detector has anything to work with.
Device panel: WiFi signal −44 dBm, online and connected, air quality calibration 1, uptime 2,225 seconds.
Every unit reports its own health. Signal strength, uptime and a live heartbeat — so a sensor that has dropped off the network tells you, rather than quietly watching nothing across a hundred rooms.

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.

Said plainly: Pulse is not a flood alarm and has no water contact — it will not tell you a pipe has burst this minute. What it detects is the humidity signature of a room that is getting damp and staying damp. For catastrophic leaks, pair it with a leak detector under the basin; the two answer different questions.
The room that stops drying out. Humidity spikes after every shower and never returns to baseline — the fan has failed, months before anything is visible on a wall.
Room 07 · relative humidity · 01/03/2026 – 28/03/2026
9080 706050 alert · 70% 19/03 notified 01/03 08/03 28/03
Relative humidity Sustained-damp threshold
Comfort gauges: temperature 27.5 °C, humidity 41 percent, sound 34 dBA.
Humidity, banded both ways. Below 30% is too dry and cracks the joinery; above 60% is where damp starts. Only the middle is green — which is why the same gauge answers a guest comfort question and a building maintenance one.

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.

Proof the room was actually cleaned
particulates + volatile compounds + presence

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.

Air conditioning that has quietly failed
infrared command + temperature response

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.

Extractor fan failure
humidity decay

Humidity spikes after a shower and then doesn't come back down. The fan has died, months before the damp shows on a wall.

Frost and burst-pipe risk
°C, falling

A vacant unit dropping towards freezing in January. The cheapest water damage is the kind that never happens.

Window open, heating on
°C + humidity

Heating running hard while the room refuses to warm. Money leaving through a sash window.

Lights burning in an empty room
lux + radar

Light level high, nobody present, for hours. Small money on one room, real money across a hundred.

Which rooms are free right now
radar

Housekeeping stops knocking on occupied doors. Rooms get turned in the order they're actually available.

More guests than the booking
CO₂ + radar

A room let to two, slept in by six. The air says so within an hour, long before the party rule would ever fire.

Why that room keeps getting three-star reviews
portfolio comparison

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.

Rooms that are stuffy enough to cost you a review
CO₂ overnight

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.

Summary tiles: temperature 27.5 °C, humidity 41 percent, CO₂ 583 ppm, noise 34 dBA, occupancy detected, light 79 lx, air quality 72, pressure 1,019 hPa.
The whole room in one strip. This is the top of every room's page. Eight readings, a glance, no interpretation required — which is the difference between a system staff use and one they stop opening after a fortnight.
Sound level
dBA · A-weighted

Loudness only. The measurement your party rule runs on, and the one that cannot be turned back into speech.

Occupancy
24 GHz radar

Detects a still, breathing person in the dark. No lens, no image.

Distance to person
cm

Tells a person in the room from movement in the corridor.

Temperature
°C

Comfort complaints, and frost risk in an empty property.

Humidity
% RH

The damp early-warning trace. Your most valuable long-run reading.

CO₂ equivalent
ppm

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.

Air quality index
AQI

A single overall figure for how the room's air is doing.

Volatile compounds
ppm

Aerosols, solvents, cleaning products — and stale, unaired rooms.

Particulates
µg/m³ · optional

Smoke and dust, on units fitted with the particle module.

Light level
lux

Lights left burning in a room nobody is in.

Air pressure
hPa

Weather context for the heating and cooling logic.

Peak sound
amplitude

Separates one slammed door from a sustained disturbance.

Infrared out and in
transmit · learn

Controls the air conditioning and television you already own, and learns their codes from your existing remote in one pass.


What the status quo costs

Put your own numbers in. We haven't guessed for you.

Every figure below is your own arithmetic on your own estate — no industry averages, no survey nobody can find. Change anything you disagree with.

Annual cost of not knowing
£0
— per room, per year
Energy burnt heating and cooling empty rooms
£0
Recovered by the five-minute empty-room rule. This is the line that usually pays for the hardware on its own.
Revenue lost to rooms out of service
£0
Nights you couldn't sell after an incident — before you count the refunds to neighbouring rooms.
Damp and water repairs
£0
Early warning doesn't remove this, but catching it in week three rather than month six changes the size of the job.
Your own figure to add
Reviews
One "we couldn't sleep, the room next door had a party" review sits on your listing for years. We've left it out of the total because it's real and we can't price it honestly.

Assumptions you can check: energy = rooms × occupancy × wasted hours × load in kW × price per kWh × 365. Lost revenue = incidents × nights out of service × nightly rate. Nothing is discounted, marked up or annualised in a way that flatters us. All figures in £ GBP, dates dd/mm/yyyy.


Practical detail

Fits a building you already run.

Installing it

  • One unit per room, wall or ceiling
  • Standard USB-C power — no rewiring
  • Joins your existing Wi-Fi
  • Under ten minutes a room
  • No cabling, no builder, no room out of service

Running it

  • One dashboard, every room on it
  • Alerts to phone, email or your existing system
  • Thresholds and quiet hours set per property
  • Full history for deposit and insurance claims
  • Data stays on your own server if you want it to

Telling guests

  • Declare it in the listing — it deters bad bookings
  • No camera and no audio recording to disclose
  • Meets platform rules on indoor devices
  • Wording supplied for listings and key-card wallets
  • Nothing you'd be uncomfortable explaining at check-in

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.