Nobody fills in the registration card.
Owners don’t register products. They do keep the invoice, the installer’s docket and the manual from the box — so the installed base could become knowable as a by-product of running a home, with the owner’s permission.
Registration is the wrong shape
Registration rates are low enough that most of the installed base is invisible. The trail ends at the merchant, and the household that lives with the product for fifteen years is someone you cannot name.
An owner drags in the plumber’s invoice, the manual from the box, a photo of the compliance plate. A worker reads it and it comes back as suggestions — model, serial, install date, warranty expiry — for the owner to confirm or correct. Nothing is written silently.
What the card asks for
- model
- serial
- retailer
- date of purchase
What the owner already keeps
- the invoice, because it is the receipt
- the manual, because the oven has a mode nobody understands
- the plate, photographed at knee height
The same facts. One is a form; the other is a by-product.
What the gap costs
- The replacement moment belongs to someone else
- A hot water unit fails at year eleven and the plumber recommends what is on the van, with the household standing in a cold shower.
- Recalls are the sharpest version of it
- You cannot notify owners you never knew you had, so the notice goes out through retailers and the regulator and unsafe units stay in service.
- Your service network dispatches blind
- No install date, no fault history, no confirmed warranty position, so in-warranty status gets decided on the doorstep, or conceded.
The record belongs to the homeowner
It is their invoice, their house, their history. Anything a manufacturer ever saw would be either aggregate — no address, no name, no unit anyone could walk to — or something an owner had specifically and revocably agreed to share.
We are not building a list to sell you. Designing the alternative honestly is the problem we find interesting, and we haven’t solved it: what is the unit of consent — one appliance, one brand, one question?
What doesn’t exist
None of this is built. There is no manufacturer portal, dashboard, API, data feed or analytics, and no arrangement under which anything would flow to you. We won’t quote you an installed base or a coverage figure, because the honest number is small and a number isn’t what this conversation is about.
It registers nothing in your systems, files no claim, and sends nobody anything — there is no email, notification or reminder anywhere in the product. Everything on this page that involves you is a proposal.
Bring one product category
If any of this is recognisable, we would like an hour. Bring a single range — hot water, a split system, a front loader — and the questions you can’t currently answer about its installed base. Nothing to buy, no data to supply, no commitment.
Write to hello@atty.house.