Photograph it once — from nameplate to record

By the end of this guide you’ll know how to turn one photo into a drafted inventory record — what she does with it, what happens on your phone specifically, and what to expect when she can’t look the product up at all.

How it works

1. Photograph the nameplate

   Most appliances carry a small plate or sticker with the model number — that’s the photo that gives Charyl the most to work with. Attach it to a chat message with the paperclip button, in the web app or the mobile app.

2. She researches it, with Charyl Cloud

   With Charyl Cloud, she looks the model up against Singer Intelligent Homes’ researched knowledge — the same shared cache every subscriber’s Charyl draws from — pulling specs, a product image when one exists, and the manual.

3. She drafts the record

   What comes back is a proposal, not a finished entry: the make and model, with the manual attached when she found one.

4. You approve it

   Nothing is added to your inventory until you say so, on the Review page.

5. She looks for the warranty

   Once it’s on record, she keeps looking for its warranty terms — its length, and what’s covered when the maker says — and when she finds them she drafts the warranty for you to approve too. Anything she finds comes to you as a proposal, and never changes dates you gave her yourself.

• Try: “I just bought a new Bosch dishwasher, can you add it?” — attach the nameplate photo, and that’s the whole request.

Get the whole plate in frame

The photo does the heavy lifting, so it’s worth a moment’s care. Fit the whole nameplate in frame rather than a corner of it, with enough light that the model number reads clearly instead of being guessed at. If the plate is tucked somewhere awkward — behind a door, under a lip, low against a baseboard — a slight angle beats a blurry straight-on shot every time. None of this is exact science: if the first photo doesn’t produce a clean read, a second attempt from a different distance or angle almost always does.

If it’s already in your inventory

Photograph something you’ve already recorded — under a slightly different name than she expects, say — and she checks first rather than quietly creating a second entry for the same appliance. The same make and model already on file is enough for her to ask before adding a duplicate, so re-photographing something out of habit doesn’t leave you with two records to untangle later.

On the web, or on your phone

The flow is the same wherever you start it, but the mobile app changes how you wait for it. Instead of holding the app open while the pipeline runs, you get an acknowledgment right away and are free to move on; an in-app notification tells you when the proposal is ready to review, and tapping it takes you straight there.

The notification itself stays deliberately plain — it says only that something’s ready to review, never the name of what you photographed. That’s on purpose: a phone glanced at on a nightstand shouldn’t reveal what’s in your house.

When she can’t look it up

Research needs Charyl Cloud, and even with it, not every product turns up a match. Either way, you’re not stuck: tell her what it is in your own words, and she drafts the record from what you’ve told her instead of what she found. It’s a plainer entry — no manual, no pulled specs — but it’s still a real, approvable proposal, and you can always fill in the rest by hand afterward.

Being honest about how well this works

Most of the time, one photo is enough to produce a drafted record. Occasionally she’ll read the photo and reply without producing a card at all. If that happens, ask again, or check the Review page a moment later before assuming nothing happened; nothing about the photo was lost, the draft just didn’t form on the first pass.

Where to next

• Introduce Charyl to your home — a two-minute film of the room-by-room walkthrough
• Manuals and documents
• Warranties and maintenance
• How does photo capture work on my phone?
• How do I add an appliance or anything else to my home’s record?