FIRE MONITOR · EARLY ACCESS
Everyone sells you the response. Nobody sells you the twenty minutes before it.
Search for wildfire protection in Europe and you will find pumps, hoses, sprinklers and cannons. All of it answers the same question: what do you do when the fire arrives. Almost none of it answers the question that comes first, which is how you find out it is coming. Hephaestus Fire Solutions built Fire Monitor, a wildfire early warning app, because that gap nearly cost us our own house.
This is the story of why the warning and the equipment come from the same company, what the app actually tells you, and where it stops. If you are still deciding what your property needs, start with the portable kit or fixed system comparison instead, then come back to this.
Know before you see the smoke.
Satellite wildfire alerts for your home, land or business. You get the distance, the intensity and the direction while there is still time to act.
Covering 37 countries across Europe and the Mediterranean.
Join the waitlist
Free during early access. Currently invite only.
The equipment was never the hard part.
In July 2025 a wildfire reached Souni, the village in the Limassol district where this company is based. Seventy-three homes in the area were destroyed. Ours was not one of them, and neither were the houses immediately around us.
We had sample protection equipment at the house at the time. We used it. It worked. That is the part of the story that sounds like a good advertisement, and it is true.
Here is the part that is less comfortable. The equipment was not the hard part of that day. The hard part was that we did not know the fire was coming until it was close enough to see. Everything after that point was compressed into far less time than it needed to be. Hoses that should have been laid calmly were laid at a run. Decisions that deserved ten minutes got thirty seconds.
A pump you own and cannot reach in time is not protection. It is regret with a serial number.
A warning that only says “fire” is not a warning.
Plenty of sources will tell you that something is burning somewhere. National feeds, news alerts, a neighbour’s message in a group chat. The problem is that none of that tells you whether it is your problem.
To act, you need three things at once: how far away it is, how intense it is, and whether it is getting closer. Distance without intensity makes you complacent about a fire that is growing fast. Intensity without distance makes you panic about something eighty kilometres away. Neither one, on its own, is enough to decide whether you start the pump or finish your coffee.
FIRE MONITOR · AT A GLANCE
Satellite wildfire alerts, tied to the ground you care about
monitored
to alert
monitoring
up to all of Europe
Every alert carries distance, location, energy output, and whether it falls inside the area you asked us to watch. Enough to decide with, in one line.
How the wildfire early warning app works.
There is no hardware to install and nothing to mount on your roof. Fire Monitor watches from orbit, which means it works the same whether your property is a village house, a farm, or a factory you visit twice a month.
HOW IT WORKS · 3 STEPS
From orbit to your phone
The settings people get wrong.
A few choices do most of the work, and all of them are easy to set badly.
What it does not do.
We would rather say this plainly than have you find it out on the worst possible day.
HONEST LIMITS
An early-warning tool, not a guarantee
Fire Monitor relies on public satellite data. That data can be delayed, incomplete or wrong. Cloud cover hides fires. Small fires under the detection threshold are missed entirely. A fast fire can cover ground in less time than the next satellite pass.
It is not a substitute for official emergency services, for local knowledge, or for your own judgement when you can smell smoke. In an emergency, call 112.
What it does is shift the odds. Most of the time, it tells you first.
Software and hardware, one problem.
Wildfire protection in Europe has been a catalogue business for a long time. Generic imports, white label boxes, no research and no product development behind them. A supplier ships you a pump and the relationship ends there.
We are building it differently. Hephaestus is a technology company that happens to build hardware, because in the last hundred metres of a wildfire the problem is physical and no amount of software moves water. But the problem we are actually solving is not “sell pumps”. It is that a property is at risk, somebody needs to know in time, and somebody needs to be able to act.
That is one problem with two halves. An alert with no equipment behind it is anxiety. Equipment with no alert in front of it is an expensive object in a shed. Whichever half you are missing, the other one is worth less than you paid for it. So we develop both, and we develop them to work together rather than as two separate purchases: engineered systems installed today are designed to be upgrade ready, and remote-controlled protection for homes and factories is in development.
Fire Monitor is free during early access, and it stays useful even if you never buy anything from us. If it does send you looking at equipment, the comparison of portable kits and fixed systems is the place to start.
Frequently asked
Is Fire Monitor free?
It is free during early access, with no card required. We are opening access in stages, starting in Cyprus, so that alerts stay fast and reliable as the number of users grows.
Do I need to buy Hephaestus equipment to use it?
No. Fire Monitor works on its own and is useful whether your response plan involves our equipment, someone else’s, or simply leaving early.
Which countries does it cover?
Thirty-seven countries across Europe and the Mediterranean. Access is being opened by stages rather than all at once, so your waitlist position depends partly on where your places are.
How fast is the alert?
Within 30 minutes of satellite detection, by push notification and email together, so it reaches you with the app closed.
Detection is not the same as ignition. A fire exists before a satellite sees it. This is the limit that matters most to understand.
Will it wake me up for every agricultural burn?
No. Prescribed burns, flares and industrial heat sources are filtered out before an alert is sent, and alerts are limited to the watch area you set around each property.
Do I need to install an app from a store?
On Android, install it from Google Play. On iPhone, it runs in Safari and installs to your home screen.
The bottom line.
Equipment decides what you can do. The warning decides whether you get to do it at all.
In Souni we had the equipment and nearly missed the window to use it. Twenty minutes of notice would have changed that day from a scramble into a plan. That is the whole reason Fire Monitor exists, and it is why it is free while we open it up.
Be ready. Stay safe.
Early access
Know before you see the smoke.
Free during early access, no card required. Leave your email and we will send your invite when a place opens.
Be ready. Stay safe.
EUIPO No. 019299851 · CE Certified · Shipping across the EU from Cyprus
