10 Ways to Save Money on Your Home Heating Bill

by hppadmin | Nov 14, 2020 | Heating

10 Ways to Save Money on Your Home Heating Bill

It is getting cold outside, have you started noticing your home heating bill slowly rising?

With the winter cold season right around the corner, we thought we would give you some suggestions to keep your heating bill from breaking the bank and help save you some money. If you are consistently spending a lot of money on your energy bill, consider checking some of these money saving ideas.

Get an Energy Audit
Use a Programmable Smart Thermostat
Insulate Your Home
Weather-strip Windows and Doors
Keep Heat Running
Reduce Use of Electric Heaters
Check Storm Windows
Reduce Heat Loss
Adjust Your Curtains
Use Ceiling Fans

1. Get an Energy Audit

When you do an energy audit, it typically includes a series of tests to determine the efficiency of your heating and cooling system. These two to three hour tests may cost anywhere from $250 to $400, check with your utility company though as they may offer a rebate or even do it for free.

2. Use a Programmable Smart Thermostat

One of the easiest ways to conserve energy and save money is to adjust your thermostat for various times of the day. For instance, if you turn down the temperature when you leave your house for extended periods of time or while you are asleep, it can make a big difference. It can sometimes be hard to remember to do this though, we suggested getting a smart thermostat like a Google Nest so that it will make the adjustments for you automatically.

In general, try to keep your house as cool as possible during the winter. You can always put on additional clothes or a comfy blanket to warm up.

3. Insulate Your Home

The Department of Energy has a website you can visit to help you determine how much insulation your home needs. Using that information you can decide if you need to add additional insulation to your home, older homes especially might need an upgrade. Insulation basically keeps the warm air inside your house for a longer period which reduces how often your furnace needs to run, this also works in the summer with cool air and your air conditioner.

4. Weather-strip Windows and Doors

Did you know that the average home has heat loss of 25-30% of total heat usage. Much of this heat loss occurs due to having unsealed or improperly locked windows and doors. It is extremely affordable these days to buy weather stripping for your windows and doors, all major home improvement companies carry various options for you to use. Make sure you clean the surfaces very well prior to adhering the adhesive-backed strips to your surfaces.

5. Keep Heat Running

We discussed adjusting your thermostat to reduce wasted energy, some people take this too far and think they can save even more by constantly shutting off and turning their heat back on throughout the day. Believe it or not, this is actually more expensive than simply adjusting the temperature in smaller increments.

First off it takes quite a bit of energy to reboot your furnace all the time and it takes more time and energy to bring the heat back up to a comfortable level. Even if you plan to be going for a long period, like going on vacation. It is better to simply lower the temperature way down, plus it will prevent your pipes from freezing!.

6. Reduce Use of Electric Heaters

Electric heaters also known as a space heater can seem like a logical solution to provide some extra warm air in your home, the problem is they require a lot of energy which of course drives up the cost of your electric bill each month. With that said, it will lower your gas bill, so it ultimately depends on your location. It may be cheaper to reduce electricity than it is to reduce your gas bill.

If you have to use a space heater, be sure to only use them in rooms that are critical to your daily routine. For instance a small office that is always cold no matter how high the thermostat is set to. We recommend keeping it away from windows and turn them off prior to going to bed.

7. Check Storm Windows

Managing storm windows used to be a big time-consuming process, now though, new storm windows can open and close and be left on your home year-round. You can also get them with low-emissivity coatings to reduce heat loss. You will see the biggest savings when you use storm windows over single-pane windows.

If you have aluminum windows, you should not use storm windows as there could be heat buildup between the two windows and will damage the aluminum.

8. Reduce Heat Loss

There are many ways heat loss can occur, for instance it can leak through your light switch and outlet boxes in your walls, use foam gaskets behind the plates to prevent loss. Do you have an in-window air conditioner? If you do, it’s best to remove it for the winter months and close the window. Check your dryer vent, are there flaps on it and are the flaps working correctly? If you have a fireplace, close the damper when not in use – remember to open it though when you start a fire.

9. Adjust Your Curtains

The sun is a powerful, renewable energy source for generating a bit more warm air within your home. Every morning, open up all the curtains where the sun will shine in, at night close the curtains to trap the heat in.

10. Use Ceiling Fans

A ceiling fan has two directions it can spin, during the summer months it should spin in the direction to pull the air upwards, but during the winter months you should reverse the direction to push the warm air that has collected at the ceiling to be pushed down.

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2021 Paint Colors of the Year

by hppadmin | Nov 2, 2020 | Painting

2021 Paint Colors of the Year

What colors will represent 2021?

With 2020 coming to a close, it’s time to start thinking about 2021!

The top paint companies have started talking about color paint trends and so we thought we’d highlight the colors for next year.

First up we have Benjamin Moore…

Benjamin Moore: Aegean Teal 2136-40

Intriguing, balanced, and deeply soothing, the Benjamin Moore Color of the Year 2021, Aegean Teal 2136-40, creates natural harmony. Celebrate the simple pleasures—think the faded rumple of linen sheets in the morning and perfectly ripened fruits on the windowsill.

Full 2010 Benjamin Moore Color Palette

Gray Cashmere
Atrium White
Muslin
Foggy Morning
Amazon Soil
Silhouette
Kingsport Gray
Beacon Hill Damask
Chestertown Buff
Potters Clay
Rosy Peach

Learn more: Benjamin Moore

Sherwin-Williams: Urbane Bronze SW 7048 (245-C7)

Tap into nature with a hue whose warmth and comfort breathe down-to-earth tranquility. Our 2021 Color of the Year, Urbane Bronze, captures that simple sophistication every space is searching for. Urbane Bronze might be a color rooted in nature, but it also has a unique ability to ground a room through organic appeal.

Learn more: Sherwin-Williams

Behr: 21 Color Palette

Behr has announced a 2021 color palette with a range of colors.

The BEHR Color Trends 2021 Palette is a curated selection of hues to create a desired mood that complements your style in any space.

They have grouped their color palettes into several categories…

Casual Comfort: Light, Warm Neutrals

Calm Zone: Restorative Blues and Greens

Subtle Focus: Soft, Gentle Hues

Quiet Haven: Rich, Evocative Colors

Optimistic View: Bold and Saturated

Outdoor Escape: Easy Curbside Appeal

Learn more: Behr

Valspar: 12 Colors for 2021

This year’s trendiest colors are all about making you feel cozy and comfortable. Our color experts present you with 12 fresh and familiar colors that are on-trend now and easy to love forever.

Blissful Blue – This muted indigo taps into the organic tones of a morning mist.

Soft Candlelight – This mature yellow lights up a space with a golden glow.

Granite Dust – Inspired by the protective qualities of natural stone, Granite Dust allows you to create your own personal haven.

Cherry Taupe – Cherry Taupe is a botanical neutral that adds rich sophisticated softness.

Arizona Dust – This modern apricot shade with a bold twist evokes our desire to embrace vibrant tones from nature.

Garden Flower – Modernly classic like the beauty of white roses, this natural tint is soft and simple setting our mind at ease.

Academy Gray – A deep blueish gray that promotes the importance of time spent at leisure, allowing us to unwind and relax.

Unforgettable – A shade with no time restraint, this white has warmth to soften rooms and lend an elevated sophistication.

Gallery Gray – Embodying minimalism, this fresh shade of warm gray inspires a feeling that is modern and natural.

Dusty Lavender – Dusty Lavender creates a soft but unexpectedly dynamic feel that is warm and inviting.

Maple Leaf – A warm camel shade that has an authentic quality, embracing our appreciation for a handmade craft.

Lucy Blue – Familiar and calming, like the waves of the ocean. We look to blue to bring a playful happiness into the home.

Learn more: Valspar

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Wild Fox Painting is focused on providing Trustworthy, Reliable and Respectful interior painting solutions for your home.

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Trusted Referral Partners

by hppadmin | Oct 30, 2020 | Trusted Partners

Trusted Referral Partners

High Quality Leads come from High Quality Referrals

One key piece of Home Pro Partners is the concept of “Trusted Partners”, we currently have a basic foundation in place to help you build out a mini-network of partners you know and trust, but what does that mean?

There are several terms that you may hear that all basically mean the same thing… “Trusted Partners”, “Referral Partners”, “Sphere Group” and so on. We will use the term Trusted Partner going forward.

Let’s imagine you own a flooring company, you do all things flooring. You recently refinished a floor but had to remove the baseboards first, finished the floor and then reinstalled the baseboards. During the process of removing and installing you scuffed the paint job, left new nail holes, broke a piece and had to install a new section that isn’t painted at all.

The client of course isn’t going to like how the baseboards look, you are a flooring company, not a painter. So what do you do, you bring in a trusted partner.

Possible Solutions

1. You could have someone on your crew fill holes, caulk the edges and paint. The problem with this is you pull one of your flooring people off of a skill they are great at and move them to something they are only “ok” at, which wastes time, money and the job isn’t done very well.

2. You could tell the client it’s their problem, you had warned them ahead of time they would have to deal with that on their own. This leads to terrible customer service and likely a grumpy client.

3. You call the really good painter you know to come do what they do best, paint. The floors are brand new, so you don’t want some terrible painter coming in and screwing up the floor, so instead, you bring in a painter that you know very well and trust will do a high quality job. This painter is one of your Trusted Partners.

It’s likely you know many trusted partners, plumbers, electricians, roofers, HVAC, landscaper and countless others. Home Pro Partners becomes powerful when you add all these partners to your profile, it gives you a way to connect your clients with other service providers that you are confident won’t make you look bad.

Referrals, use every tool in your toolbox!

When you and your network of Trusted Partners all connect with each other on Home Pro Partners, you build a strong referral network that helps all of you grow.

Every time one of your trusted partners shares their profile on Facebook, Nextdoor, Twitter and countless other locations. Your company will be seen by all those potential clients as well when that profile is viewed.

Imagine if you had 30 partners and those partners share their profile once a week to their friends, family and social connections. That leads to potentially thousands of views a week, you now have a network of partners acting as your marketing team and you are doing the same for them. The cost for all this extra marketing is essentially nothing.

Compare that to using a service like Home Advisor, it’s not uncommon for home pros to set a monthly lead fee budget of $1,000. Plus, if you accept opportunity leads for an additional $75-$200 per lead, your marketing budget explodes in cost. You could easily spend $10K – $15K per year, just with Home Advisor and remember you are competing with 5, 10, 15+ competitors who also got those same leads.

Work smarter, not harder with your marketing budget. It’s just like teaching, do you teach one person per class or 30 people per class? Do you get your leads from one source or 30 sources? Which is more efficient, more lucrative and more powerful?

Homeowner Referral Requests

As members of several local “community Facebook groups”, we are constantly seeing requests like the one you see above by homeowners. There are easily 2-3 requests like this across each group every day, is your company being referred? Are your trusted partners being referred?

Imagine being able to post a link to your Home Pro Partners profile and saying “I have the perfect person, check out “123 Cleaning” in my Trusted Partners list.

Think of all the people that will visit your profile and not only see you, but also your partners. You are marketing your company while also providing value to homeowners and adding value to your partners. This is a powerful combination of networking, marketing and sales.

Value Focused

As you have read above, the goal of Home Pro Partners is for us to add value to you, and for you to use our tool to provide additional value to your customers.

If you haven’t figured it out yet, your company may offer roofing, or flooring or plumbing or any number of other services (same as all your competitors); but ultimately what you are truly offering is value. When you add value and your competitor doesn’t, you win every time with higher quality clients and better paying jobs.

Are you ready to provide more value to your customers? Publish your profile on Home Pro Partners and encourage your trusted partners to do the same and help each other grow and succeed.

Home Pro Partners

Skilled laborers... publish a Home Pro Partner profile and invite trusted referral partners to your company profile.

Reach new customers with Home Pro Partners, no lead fees, no gimmicks, no hassle.

Join the Pro Network

Creating and Managing Your Pro Account

by hppadmin | Oct 29, 2020 | Account

Creating & Managing Your Pro Account

Setting up your Home Pro Partners Account

As with any project, it’s important to build out a solid foundation and prep your job before you get to far along. A good foundation makes the rest of the job go smoothly and efficiently. Your company profile works the same way.

When you join Home Pro Partners, it too takes some thoughtful effort to build out your profile. It’s difficult to write about yourself, it takes a lot of time and effort as well. In the end though, that time spent is worth it as the better profile you have, the more likely a homeowner will connect with you.

The first step to success it to create your profile listing…

Registration

It’s quite easy to register on Home Pro Partners, you only need to know a few simple things.

1. Service Category: What industry do you work in? Are you a painter, landscaper, interior designer or one of our other 35+ categories.

2. Username: Your username is part of the URL that will link to your profile details page, most likely you will want your company name if it hasn’t been snagged by someone else first.

3. Email: We of course need an email account so that we can send customer contact requests off to you.

4. Password: Need to keep your account secure!

5. Pay & Sign Up: We do have a flat $25 per month fee to add a profile, which is a fairly small cost compared to our competitors who charge $75 to $200 per lead.

Manage Listing

After you have registered, we take you to your “Manage Listing” page so you can continue to flush out your profile with information about your company.

1. Profile Picture: Over in the left sidebar, you will see a placeholder image. Before your profile is live, you will need to change this image to one of your own. We suggest your company logo as it will best represent you.

2. Basic Information: In the right column, we have a bunch of fields that you can fill out. Any field with a red border on the right is required. In the first section, you enter your Name, a Short Bio which shows up on your Profile Card and a Long Bio which supports Markdown formatting (Let us know if you need help with this.) If you want to see how your long bio will look to home owners, simply click the “Switch to Preview Mode” button to toggle the display.

Writing your long bio can be frustrating, we highly suggest thinking deeply about what you want here and write 3+ paragraphs talking about your company. It will show homeowners that you gave it some real thought and they will appreciate that effort.

Websites & Social Accounts

In today’s tech focused world, homeowners expect you to have a website, social media accounts and want to see listing you have on other home services sites.

We offer a fairly comprehensive list of profiles you can add to your account, if we are missing any crucial ones, let us know and we’ll consider adding it.

One interesting thing we have as well is a “Web Badge”, if you copy the code in the blue box and paste it into your website, we’ll show the green badge on your own site. This is just a simple way for you to link to your Home Pro Partners profile from your website and is also a sign of trust to homeowners who are familar with Home Pro Partners.

Contact Information

What good is having a profile if no one can connect with you? In this section we allow you to enter information you want displayed on your profile.

The first value is your email address which you signed up with, this is un-editable and also NOT publicly visible, we do however use this to send you contact requests from your profile. Make sure we are on your safe senders list in your email system so requests don’t accidently go to your spam folder.

You can also add standard contact information, phone, city, state, zip and an actual address.

Publishing

When you have completed filling out all the fields mentioned above, the final step is to click the “Publish Listing” button to make your profile live and visible to the public. Any time you make an update to your information, remember to click that publish button to save and push out the updates.

At that point, you are now active on Home Pro Partners!

Sound easy enough, ready to get started? Head on over to our registration page and start promoting your company.

Home Pro Partners

Skilled laborers... publish a Home Pro Partner profile and invite trusted referral partners to your company profile.

Reach new customers with Home Pro Partners, no lead fees, no gimmicks, no hassle.

Join the Pro Network

Introducing Home Pro Partners

by hppadmin | Oct 29, 2020 | Announcements

Introducing Home Pro Partners

Home Pro Partners

Home Pro Partners uses the power of trusted referral partners to bring together homeowners seeking skilled labor professionals.

As a home professional, you know the best leads you receive are from direct referrals from other professionals in your network or leads from past clients.

Home Pro Partner’s mission is to help you build out your own profile and then expand the value you bring to your customers by adding other home pros that you know and trust to your page.

So how does that all work, read on below…

Profile Cards

Every home professional who publishes a profile has a “profile card” with their logo, company name, short bio, industry category, phone number and links to their website and common social media accounts. This card is how you will be discovered through our State, Category and Zip Code filters found at the top of the homepage.

Do you offer a military discount? If so, a little flag will show up in the top left corner of your profile card. This makes it easy for homeowners to quickly find pros who support our veterans and active armed forces.

Having trusted partners linked to your profile are also an important part of your profile, when you add other home pros to your profile we display an icon and the number of partners you know and trust in the top right of your profile card. The more partners you have the more trustworthy you are to homeowners.

Profile Details

In addition to your profile card, you also have a full profile details page with a unique URL specific to your company that you can share on social media, add it to your business card, website and many other places.

On the left side of your details page, we basically repeat the content from your profile card, it’s a “quick glance” area for homeowners to quickly get information about your company with the addition of a few other items.

A homeowner can quickly send you an email using our “Contact Professional” button/form, customers can contact you directly, no lead fees and it’s sent only to you, not your competitors.

We also show your city and state, the date of when you joined and last signed onto the site and tags / skills that you choose to add to your profile. Logging into the site every day or two shows customers that you are active on the site, which builds trust with homeowners.

Profile Details Continued...

The right column of your custom profile page is where you get to add more detailed information about you and your company. We give you a free-form text area to enter as detailed of bio as you wish, we also support “Markdown” which is a simple to use formatting syntax that you can add to your content to style it, such as making some text bold, or italic, or create a list, link to photos, videos and quite a bit more. If you need help with this, feel free to reach out.

At the top of the right column, we have several tabs: Biography, Projects and Trusted Partners. By default we only show the Biography tab to the public, however as soon as you add a “Project” or a “Trusted Partner” then we show these tabs as well.

We’ll get back to these tabs in a bit, but wanted to mention that we again show that you offer a Military discount and in the footer of your profile we show up-to 10 zip codes of service areas your company works in, you simply add these when you manage your profile settings.

Projects

Do you have a portfolio of projects you have worked on? Maybe you do a lot of painting, or flooring or woodwork and you want to show photos of your work to potential clients. We allow you to create as many “projects” as you want to showcase your work.

Each project has a title, date, URL, description and of course a place for photos as well.

Potential clients love to see the quality of work you provide, we encourage you to constantly add projects and photos to your profile to showcase a wide range of your skills.

Trusted Partners

The last big piece of your profile that we’d like to talk about is in our mind, one of the most important aspects of your profile: Trusted Partners.

As we mentioned at the start of this article, homeowners are constantly asking the home professionals that they know, if you can referrer them to other professionals. For instance, maybe they did their flooring, they may ask their flooring person if they know a good painter, or electrician, or plumber, the list goes on forever.

Imagine being able to quickly provide a link to your Home Pro Partners profile to your client with a list of all the other home pros that you know and trust. Your client would be able to easily research the home pros that you recommend and quickly reach out if they choose to move forward.

Your clients will see significant value in your recommendations which leads to continued trust between you and your client. Plus, you help support the professionals you know, which makes them more successful!

It’s a Win / Win / Win!

Wrapping Up...

We hope you will take some time and take a look at Home Pro Partners, we are just starting out and know it will take time to win your trust and for us to provide consistent traffic to our members, it will just take time and hope you’ll join us as we start this journey.

We are confident homeowners will quickly see the value of warm introductions to your trusted partners. Plus, other pros can add you as a trusted partner to their profiles as well.

We thank you and look forward to promoting you through Home Pro Partners!

Home Pro Partners

Skilled laborers... publish a Home Pro Partner profile and invite trusted referral partners to your company profile.

Reach new customers with Home Pro Partners, no lead fees, no gimmicks, no hassle.

Join the Pro Network

Next Entries »

10 Ways to Save Money on Your Home Heating Bill

2021 Paint Colors of the Year

Trusted Referral Partners

Creating & Managing Your Pro Account

Introducing Home Pro Partners

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