← All help

How HeatAlert thinks

Store hours and quiet hours are different things

Store 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.

These two settings look similar and mean opposite things. Getting them the wrong way round is one of the few configuration mistakes in this product that can hide a genuine emergency, so it's worth thirty seconds.

Store hoursQuiet hours
Belongs toA storeA person
DescribesWhen the building is occupied and heat threatens somebodyWhen that person would rather not be woken
Effect on an alertAlerts outside opening hours are held and delivered when the store opensNon-urgent notifications wait; the level still escalates underneath

The reasoning behind holding off-hours alerts: at 3am in a closed restaurant there is nobody to protect, and waking a manager teaches them to mute the next one. The reading is still recorded, and it still counts toward your compliance record — it simply doesn't page anyone at the moment when paging serves no purpose.

You can see it rather than having to trust it. Each unit — on its own page and on its dashboard card — shows the store's own wall clock and whether it is open right now. A company spanning four time zones cannot do that arithmetic in its head, and a red reading at a closed restaurant means something entirely different from the same reading at one mid-shift.

  • Hours and timezone are set on the store, under Stores & locations — open the store and edit it there.
  • A store with no hours set says so, because it is treated as open around the clock: alerts fire at 3am, and a cellular unit reports on the faster, costlier cadence all night.
  • The clock is the store's, not yours. A manager in Louisville and one in Los Angeles see the same store showing the same local time.
Every failure in this path is deliberately biased toward alerting. If hours are missing, malformed, or the timezone can't be resolved, the store is treated as open. A silent monitor is the outcome we design against — which is also why a store with no hours is labelled rather than quietly assumed to be open.

Related

HeatAlert monitors workplace heat and tells someone before it becomes an incident. See plans or talk to us.