When water is pouring across the floor or the house smells of gas, nobody should be hunting for the shutoff. Dwell Secure maps every valve, panel and meter in your home, walks anyone through what to do, and shares it with the people who need it.
On an ordinary day a leak, a smoking outlet or the smell of gas is a 911 call, and a crew is at the door in minutes. In a windstorm, an earthquake or a hard freeze, thousands of those calls arrive together. Crews go to the fires and the injuries first. The water keeps running.
Captain Andrew Leith spent more than twenty years watching that play out with the Shoreline Fire Department. The homes that came through best weren't the ones with the most supplies. They were the ones where somebody knew exactly where to turn the water off.
to get out of a burning home today. Forty years ago it was about 17. Modern furnishings burn hotter and faster.
UL Fire Safety Research Instituteof damage from roughly one inch of floodwater in an average home.
FEMA · National Flood Insurance Programinsured homes files a water-damage or freezing claim every year.
Insurance Information Institutein U.S. property lost to fire in 2023, a year in which fire killed 3,670 people.
NFPA via U.S. Fire AdministrationFor 150 years the same few things have decided how bad a fire or flood gets: how fast people get out, whether the gas and water can be shut off, and whether anyone knows where to find them.
Over two days, fire swept through a city built largely of wood, killing about 300 people and leaving roughly 100,000 homeless.
Lesson Fire outruns everyone's sense of how much time they have.
The South Fork Dam failed upstream after days of rain. A wall of water reached the town within the hour and killed 2,209 people.
Lesson Water arrives with less warning than anyone expects.
The quake ruptured gas lines and water mains alike. Fires burned for days with little water to fight them; about 3,000 died and 225,000 of 400,000 residents lost their homes.
Lesson A broken gas line turns one disaster into two.
Levees failed up and down the river, putting some 27,000 square miles under water and driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes.
Lesson When the water is everywhere, help can't be.
During the World Series quake, a ruptured gas line fed a fire in the Marina District while broken water mains left crews short of water.
Lesson Know where your gas shutoff is before the ground moves.
Wind-driven fire destroyed more than 3,000 homes in a single afternoon and killed 25 people, many of them on narrow roads trying to leave.
Lesson The plan has to exist before the smoke does.
Levee failures flooded about 80 percent of New Orleans. More than 1,300 people died, and families were scattered for years.
Lesson The papers you need to rebuild can't live only in the house.
Storm surge pushed seawater into basements and utility rooms across the coast, damaging or destroying about 650,000 homes.
Lesson Basements are where the shutoffs, and the water, end up.
Some areas received more than 60 inches of rain. Rescuers pulled thousands of people from flooded homes in one of the costliest storms in U.S. history.
Lesson 911 can be overwhelmed for days, not minutes.
The deadliest wildfire in California's history killed 85 people and destroyed about 18,800 structures, most of a town, in a matter of hours.
Lesson Knowing who in the house needs help getting out saves lives.
Over-pressurized gas lines set off dozens of fires and explosions across three towns in one evening, killing one person and forcing thousands from their homes.
Lesson Gas emergencies don't wait for the utility truck.
Pipes froze and burst across the state. Texans filed more than 450,000 insurance claims and insured losses passed $8 billion, much of it water damage.
Lesson The fastest way to stop the damage is a valve you can find in the dark.
Wind-whipped flames destroyed about 2,200 structures in historic Lahaina and killed 102 people, the deadliest U.S. wildfire in more than a century.
Lesson Your emergency contacts should be one tap away for everyone.
Two January wildfires destroyed more than 16,000 structures in Pacific Palisades and Altadena and took at least 29 lives.
Lesson When the house is gone, its records shouldn't go with it.
Figures are the most widely cited estimates; for older events especially, sources differ.
A guided setup asks the right questions — gas or propane? where does the water come in? — and has you snap a photo of each shutoff. The next person who needs it sees exactly what you saw.
Tap Emergency, choose flooding, electrical or gas, and Dwell Secure walks you through it step by step, with your own photos, the related shutoffs and a Call 911 button that never leaves the screen.
Mark the gas meter on the side yard, the cleanout by the driveway and the extinguisher in the kitchen. Upload floor plans and annotate them so anyone can walk straight to the right spot.
Set a schedule once and Dwell Secure reminds you when things come due: furnace filters, tankless water-heater flushes, sprinkler systems and the smoke alarm batteries everyone forgets.
Invite people with a link and choose what they can do: edit, view, or emergency-only. Property managers can hand every tenant the shutoffs for their unit, and take access back the day they move out.
Note the grandparent who uses a wheelchair, the child with asthma, and the dog who hides under the bed. With your permission, approved fire and EMS crews see it the moment they scan your code.
Deeds, insurance policies, appliance manuals. The vault encrypts each one on your phone before it's uploaded, so not even we can open it. Share the vault with family and the keys go with it; revoke access and they're changed.
A flood closes the road. A wildfire evacuation gives you ten minutes. The deed, the insurance policy and the passports are in a drawer, a filing cabinet or a fire safe in a house you're not allowed back into. And those are the papers every adjuster, agency and airline is about to ask for.
Dwell Secure's document vault keeps an encrypted copy of each one with you. Snap a photo or upload a PDF once, then open it from any of your trusted devices: on your phone in a shelter, on a tablet in a hotel room, or in a browser on a borrowed laptop.
Every file, and even its name, is locked with AES-256 on your phone before it's uploaded. Only you and the people you share with hold the keys. We can't open your documents, and neither could anyone who broke into our servers.
Open the vault on iOS or Android, or sign in from any web browser. Unlock it with your vault passphrase. If the phone is lost with everything else, the printed recovery key gets you back in.
Give your spouse or an adult child access so either of you can produce the policy. Remove someone and the keys change. Responders who scan your QR code never see the vault.
PDFs, photos and scans. JPG, PNG, HEIC, PDF, Word, Pages and plain text, organized by category for each property.
Track critical appliances, map the utility shutoffs and write the guides that will keep your family safe in an emergency. Keep the warranty dates, the serial numbers and the plumber's number where you can find them.
See the features
You love your new place. But nobody points out the water shutoff during the apartment showing. Document it the day you move in, or ask your landlord to share the property with you so you have it from day one.
How to find your shutoff
Share the key information about each property with the people who live there, so they can contain a water leak or reset a tripped breaker. Group properties, keep vendors on hand and stay on top of maintenance across your whole portfolio.
Talk to us
The person at home shouldn't have to guess where the water shutoff is or which company services the furnace. Dwell Secure gives the whole household the confidence to handle things on their own, especially when the person who usually does is a thousand miles away.
Read our story
Single-family homes, condos, apartments and ADUs, plus boats, RVs and other mobile homes. Keep the operating instructions, maintenance reminders and service contacts for each one, all under one account.
Get started free
Put your Dwell Secure QR code on the fridge or by the front door. When an approved fire or EMS agency arrives, they scan it with FireTrex Responder and see the residents, medical conditions, medications, emergency contacts and pets you chose to share.
“Homes flooded because the water shutoff couldn't be found. People were in danger because nobody knew how to shut off the gas. That's why Dwell Secure exists.”
Andrew has been answering calls since 1999. Around 2012 he began teaching disaster-preparedness classes for the public, and in class after class the same thing came up: people had the flashlights and the bottled water, but couldn't say where their own shutoffs were.
Read the whole story
Enter the address and snap a photo. Quick Setup takes it from there.
Photograph each shutoff and appliance, and write down what to do.
Invite your family, tenants and the local fire department.
Not sure where to start? Watch our water, gas and electricity shutoff videos.
Leak sensors, shutoff valves and smart smoke alarms turn hours of unnoticed damage into a phone alert. Here’s what to buy and how to connect it to Alexa, Google Home or Apple Home.
E-bikes, power tools and gadgets put dozens of lithium-ion batteries in most homes. Here’s how to charge, store, check and recycle them, according to the fire service and the manufacturers.
Frozen hose bibs, clogged dryer vents and a woodpile against the siding all come down to timing. Here’s a season-by-season checklist, and how to put it on autopilot.
Dwell Secure is free to download. Set up your first home in an afternoon, and give everyone who lives there the same peace of mind.
