Help & documentation
How HeatAlert works, in full — the concepts, the hardware, and what happens when a workplace gets dangerously hot.
How HeatAlert thinks
The handful of ideas everything else rests on — heat levels, alert cycles, escalation.
- Heat index vs WBGT — which number is this?Heat index is what temperature and humidity feel like. WBGT adds radiant heat from the sun or an oven, and is the measure OSHA guidance is written around.
- The four heat levelsSafe, Caution, Extreme Caution and Danger. The same four bands drive the colour on the device screen, the dashboard, and who gets contacted.
- Alert cycles, and why you're not asked to acknowledge twiceOne heat event is one cycle. Acknowledging covers that level and everything below it for the rest of the cycle, so a room hovering at the threshold doesn't page you every few minutes.
- Escalation — what happens when nobody answersIf an alert goes unacknowledged, the chain contacts the next people after a delay you set. It exists because the most dangerous alert is the one that reached a phone nobody was holding.
- Rapid rise detection and elevated reportingWhen a room heats up fast, units report far more often until the situation resolves — because how quickly it's climbing matters as much as where it is now.
- Store hours and quiet hours are different thingsStore hours describe when a building is occupied. Quiet hours describe when a person doesn't want to be disturbed. Confusing them is how a real alert gets silenced.
- Storm control — what happens when everything alerts at onceOn a genuine heat wave, dozens of stores can cross a threshold within minutes. Once a recipient passes a burst of alerts in a short window, further ones are rolled into one summary instead of arriving individually.
Getting around
What each page is for and when you'd open it.
- Finding an answerOne search box covers the whole product — every article and every page. The ? on a page opens help for that feature.
- Setup — one place for everything you configureAdding people, stores, regions, markets, roles and devices all live on the Setup page, grouped by what you're doing.
- The dashboard, and its five viewsOne screen, five ways to look at it: grid, stores, map, regions and triage. Which one is useful depends on how many units you're responsible for.
- Alert historyEvery alert that fired, who was contacted, who acknowledged it and how long that took. This is the page an inspector or an incident review reads.
- Readiness — the page that finds silent failuresAnswers one question for everything you're responsible for: if a store hit Danger right now, would a human actually find out?
- Settings, and how to find any pageSettings holds your plan, display preferences, branding, thresholds and digests — plus the complete map of every page your access level can open.
- Unit groupsAn informal way to group units that don't follow your store structure — a bank of ovens, a set of trial installs.
- Device requestsA queue of units asking to be re-adopted after losing their credentials. Empty almost always — and when it isn't, a device is waiting on a person.
- A person's profileOne page per person: their role, the stores they cover, how they're contacted, and any temporary coverage they're holding.
Your organization
Stores, regions, people, roles, and who gets told what.
- Organization accounts vs personal accountsA personal account owns its own units. An organization adds shared access, roles, territories and everything that depends on more than one person.
- Stores and locationsA store is the thing being protected. Units attach to stores, alerts are about stores, and compliance records are per store.
- Regions and marketsTwo independent ways to group stores. Regions are usually geographic; markets cut across them. Both exist so a person's territory is one setting instead of a list of stores.
- Store contacts vs people with loginsTwo different mechanisms, easy to confuse. A store contact is a phone number attached to a store. A member is a person with a role, a territory and possibly a login.
- Adding peopleAdd someone with their name, email, role and territory. They receive alerts straight away, and get their role automatically the first time they sign in.
- Inviting people to sign in — including hundreds at onceAlerts reach people without any invitation. An invite only adds the ability to sign in and see the dashboard — and you can send them all in one go.
- Roles and the five capabilitiesA role is a job title plus five switches. Roles are entirely yours to create, rename, reorder and delete — the starter set is a suggestion, not a fixture.
- Why a role decides how much choice someone getsEach role owns a notification policy, and a person's own preferences can only move within it. This is deliberate: it stops the person with the most responsibility opting out of the alert that matters.
- Territory — which stores are someone'sA person's territory is stated as regions, markets or individual stores. It decides what they see and what they're alerted about.
- Someone's own notification preferencesChannels, levels, quiet hours and digest timing — everything their role leaves open to them.
- My details — your contact details and storesOne page for everything about you: how alerts reach you, when to interrupt you, and which stores you're responsible for.
- Confirming your stores — the check only you can doOn first sign-in a manager confirms the stores assigned to them are right, or flags a problem. It's the one error no automated check can find.
- Temporary coverage for holidays and absenceHand someone else's stores to a stand-in for a fixed window. They receive the alerts and can acknowledge them, and the record shows who acted on whose behalf.
- Bulk import from a spreadsheetLoad stores and people from CSV. Everything is validated and previewed before anything is written, so a bad file costs you nothing.
Devices
Installing, pairing, assigning and maintaining the sensors.
- What's in the boxA sensor unit with a display, a power supply, and — depending on model — a globe probe and a cellular radio.
- Pairing a Wi-Fi unitCreate the unit in the dashboard, get an 8-character code, then join the unit's temporary setup network and enter your Wi-Fi details plus the code.
- Adding a unit to the dashboardGive it a name you'll recognize and the store it's going into. The name is what appears in alert messages.
- Putting a unit back into setup mode, remotelyFor a unit that's still reporting — before moving it, or before a network change. It opens its setup network again without losing its current connection.
- Cellular units and fleetsCellular units need no store network. Map your fleet once and units enrol themselves the first time they power on.
- Auto-enrolment and "awaiting classification"A cellular unit that powers on joins your account by itself, but it is not monitoring anything until someone says which store it protects.
- Assigning a unit to a storeThe step that turns a recording device into a monitored one. Until it's done, the unit alerts nobody.
- Reported position vs the store you assignedCellular units can report roughly where they are. If that's a long way from the store on file, the dashboard says so — as a double check, not as tracking.
- Unit settings and custom thresholdsRename a unit, change where it's assigned, adjust reporting, and — on plans that allow it — set thresholds tighter than the defaults.
- Maintenance muteSilence one unit's alerts for a set period while work is done nearby. It keeps recording, and the mute expires by itself.
- Returning a unit to unassignedPuts a unit back in the needs-a-store queue as if it had just arrived. Use it for bench-tested units — it drops the unit out of compliance reporting.
- "Offline" means different things on Wi-Fi and cellularA Wi-Fi unit reports constantly, so a few minutes of silence is a problem. A cellular unit syncs on a schedule, so the same silence is normal.
- How often a cellular unit reports, and why it changesCellular units hand over readings faster while a store is open and slower while it is closed. Wi-Fi units are unaffected — they report continuously.
- Signal strength on the unitCellular units show a signal indicator on screen, so you can tell whether a mounting spot has usable coverage before you fix it to the wall.
- Firmware updatesUnits check for updates and install them themselves. Every image is signed, and a cellular unit updates over its own connection with no store network involved.
- Device credentials, and what happens if one is lostEach unit has its own key. We store only a hash of it, so a copy of our database yields nothing a device could reuse.
Alerts & notifications
Who is contacted, how, in what order, and what stops it.
- Who gets told, and in what orderStore contacts and members whose territory covers the store, filtered by the level each has asked for — then the escalation chain if nobody responds.
- Email and SMSSMS interrupts, email documents. Use SMS for Danger and email for everything else, and remember a channel needs the contact detail behind it.
- What happens when nobody acknowledgesThe escalation chain runs step by step until someone responds. Any acknowledgment by anyone stops it for that cycle.
- Acknowledging an alertOne tap from the link in the message, no sign-in needed. It stops the escalation and stops the repeats.
- Digests — summaries instead of interruptionsA scheduled roundup for people who want a rhythm rather than an alarm. Digests never replace Danger alerts.
- Sending a test alertProves the whole path per store: routing, contact details and delivery — without creating anything that looks like a real event.
- Bounces and delivery failuresProviders tell us when a message couldn't be delivered, and we record it. A bouncing contact is someone who believes they're covered and isn't.
- Muting a unit vs quiet hours vs closed storesThree different ways alerts go quiet, for three different reasons. Knowing which is in play saves a lot of confusion.
Compliance & records
OSHA reporting, exports, retention and the audit trail.
- Your heat policyThe actions your company requires at each heat level, written by you and attached to every alert.
- OSHA reportsExportable heat records per store for a date range, built from readings that were never editable.
- What counts as monitoredA unit counts for a store from the moment it's assigned to it. Before that it records, but its readings belong to no store and appear in no report.
- How long history is keptFree keeps 30 days, Pro keeps a year, and Enterprise keeps 7 years — longer than any OSHA lookback reaches.
- Exporting your dataDownload readings as CSV for your own analysis, archive or records system.
- The audit trailWho changed what, when. Anything destructive records a full snapshot of what existed before it was removed.
- Reading the activity logThe audit trail, on a page. Filter by what kind of change it was, and open any entry to see the values it replaced.
Account & plans
Plans, billing, branding and your own data.
- Plans and what each one includesFree for trying it out, Pro for a single site owner, Enterprise for organizations, Franchise for multi-brand estates.
- Billing and changing planManage your subscription, payment method and invoices from the Billing page. Upgrades take effect immediately.
- If a payment fails, monitoring keeps runningA declined card never stops your sensors, your alerts or your escalation. You get 14 days, and after that only configuration is frozen.
- Your company logo and colourUpload a logo and set a colour, and every member sees the same branded dashboard.
- Your data, and closing your accountExport everything at any time. Closing an account removes your data — which for a compliance record is irreversible.
Security & trust
How your data is protected — and what to send a security reviewer.
- How your data is protectedEncrypted in transit, isolated per customer, with credentials stored only as hashes and every access check derived on the server.
- Device identity and firmware integrityEach unit has its own credential, stored only as a hash, and firmware images are cryptographically signed.
- Who else touches your dataA short, deliberately boring list: hosting, authentication, email, SMS, payments and cellular connectivity.
Already using HeatAlert? Open help inside your dashboard for guidance specific to your access level.