Privacy
Privacy policy, what we collect and what we do not
Last updated September 2026. Written to be read rather than to be defensible, and short because the honest version is short.
The Short Version
What this site collects
Reading these pages requires nothing from you. There is no account, no newsletter and no form that must be completed before content appears. The tools on this site run entirely in your browser: the fault decoder makes its decisions on your device, and nothing you select in it is transmitted or stored anywhere.
We keep aggregate analytics about how pages are used, which pages are read, roughly where readers are, which page sent them. It is self-hosted rather than handed to an advertising network, and it is not tied to an identity.
When You Ask To Be Connected
What happens to your information
If you choose to be connected with a heating and cooling company, the information needed to make that connection reaches that company. That is the entire purpose of the request, and it is the point at which you stop being anonymous to them. What they do with it afterwards is governed by their own privacy practices, and it is fair to ask them for those.
We do not sell contact information, and we do not pass it to parties who are not the company being asked to help you.
Your Side
Access, deletion and questions
You can ask what we hold about you and ask us to delete it, through contact. Depending on where you live you may have statutory rights to do so; where you do not, we will honor the request anyway, because refusing would require a reason we do not have.
Cookies used by this site are limited to what makes it work. There is no advertising network embedded in these pages and no cross-site tracking pixel.
Before you call anyone
The flat-fee match — we are paid for the introduction, not for the size of your job
Most heating and cooling advice is written by the company that wants to do the work. That is not a failing of the people who read it; it is a defect in who is talking: the diagnosis, the estimate and the invoice come from one party, and no amount of care on your side fixes that.
We are built the other way round. We do not repair, install or sell equipment, so the payment reaches us when you are connected to a licensed, insured heating and cooling company — the same amount whether you need a forty-dollar capacitor or a whole new system. Nobody here has a reason to talk you into the larger number. You can check that rather than take it on trust: how we make money is written down, and this site keeps telling readers when not to buy — that a heat pump may not pay off on cheap gas, that most people should buy a hygrometer before a humidifier, that the federal order puts air cleaners last. Why does not everyone work this way? Because a flat fee leaves money on the table every time the job turns out to be big.
Waiting is the one thing that actually costs money. A system that fails in the first heatwave or the first hard freeze puts you in the overtime queue — the federal occupational handbook says this trade works overtime in peak season, and you pay for it. A refrigerant leak on a running system takes the compressor with it; a blocked condensate drain becomes a ceiling. And if it turns out to be a filter, say so on the call. We will tell you, and that call earns us nothing.
Not for you if: you want a price over the phone — nobody honest gives one without seeing the house; you need a guarantee of same-day arrival — we cannot promise that for a company we do not run; the building is commercial; or you would rather do it yourself, in which case the pages on this site are written so that you can.