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Tell us about the house
Add your appliances and choose the home-care tasks that matter to you.
Preventative home care
Tell us what you have. Harbor Steady turns it into a dated, priced plan of exactly what to do and when — with a clear line between what you can safely handle and what belongs to a professional.
Free to build. No card required.
Cleaner airflow, lower system strain, and one less avoidable repair.
How it works
Most home advice assumes you already know the vocabulary. This does not. Every task says what it costs, how long it takes, what it needs, and where the safe stopping point is.
Add your appliances and choose the home-care tasks that matter to you.
See seasonal work in plain language with the time, tools, likely cost and risk level upfront.
Follow a focused guide for appropriate DIY jobs or take a prepared scope to a qualified professional.
The problem
Most people learn home care after something breaks. The repair bill is the tuition. A plan changes the order of those two events.
A $22 filter, a disconnected hose, a cleared drain line. Most of the failures that turn into four-figure repairs start as ten-minute jobs nobody knew to do.
Every task carries a real cost range, so the year ahead is a number you can plan for instead of a surprise you absorb.
Each guide names the point where a reasonable DIY job becomes a professional one — gas, spring tension, structure, refrigerant, height.
The library
Not a checklist of nouns. Every entry has the reason it matters, the tools, numbered steps, the honest cost range, and a stop sign for the moment it stops being a DIY job.
Water left in a lateral line freezes, expands, and splits PVC underground where you will not find it until spring.
Coverage
Pick a category to see what is in it. Your plan only ever shows the parts that apply to your home.
Membership
The plan, the library and the reminders cost nothing. Plus adds the parts that save money — quote requests, cost tracking, records and unlimited appliances.
Enough to stop the preventable failures.
For the household running the whole house.
Renews automatically each year ($79) or month ($9) until you cancel. Cancel any time in Settings → Manage billing; Plus stays on until the end of the period you paid for. No refunds for partly used periods. See the Terms.
No. That is the premise. Every guide assumes you have never done the task, names the tools by what they are called in a store, and tells you what "good" looks like when you are finished.
By consequence, not difficulty. Anything involving gas, combustion, refrigerant, spring tension, structural members, or working at height is marked professional regardless of how simple the steps are. Everything else gets an honest risk level and a stated stopping point.
They are national ranges for materials and typical service pricing, meant for planning rather than quoting. When you want a real number, the app builds a scoped request you send to several local contractors and stores what comes back on the task.
Yes. Choose your home type during setup and the plan drops anything you don't own or control — no roof tasks for a condo, no water heater tasks if your landlord handles them.
Harbor Steady puts them in the calendar you already use rather than sending you email. Press Reminders and it builds a recurring event for every task in your plan — the right months for your climate, with the steps, the tools and the cost range in the event notes, and an alert the day before. One import and the plan follows you to your phone, your watch and your desk. Individual tasks can go across one at a time.
Two things. A barcode is read from the camera, checked against its own check digit, and stored with the appliance — that number is what a parts counter or a technician asks for. A model number is matched against the way the major manufacturers manage their numbering, so typing WRF535SWHZ fills in Whirlpool and refrigerator before you touch anything else. It is not a product database lookup, so the details arrive pre-filled for you to confirm rather than asserted as fact. Scanning works on iPhone and Android alike; if a camera is unavailable, typing the number gets you the same result.
Email the address in the footer. It is a real inbox with a real person behind it, not a ticket queue, and you will hear back. If something in a guide is wrong or unclear for your equipment, that is exactly the kind of message worth sending — the library gets better because people write in.
It stays in your browser, on your device. Your plan, appliances, contractors and quotes are never sent anywhere — there is no account to create and nothing to breach. The trade-off is that a plan built on your laptop is not automatically on your phone: use Export in Settings and paste the backup into Restore on the other device. Clearing your browser data for this site erases the plan, so keep an export if it matters to you.
Any time, and your plan and records stay readable on the Free tier. Annual members who cancel keep Plus through the end of the term.
Build the plan free. You can always decide later that some of it is not worth doing — at least you'll be deciding.
Add your appliances and choose the home-care systems that matter to you. Nothing here is permanent — you can change any of it later.
Choose what you want the plan to cover and how much of it you want to do yourself. This decides what lands on your list — and what stays in the library until you ask for it.
Here is what your plan will look like. Professional tasks are separated out with a cost range, so you can see the year ahead before you commit to any of it.