Real Home Energy Solutions

Replies to Frequent Comments

Thanks for all the comments!  Per our comment policy, we don’t publish comments that don’t support our subject.  However, we appreciate the time you’ve taken to send us a lot of supportive comments and administrative questions.

Please don’t be offended if you don’t see your comment under the blog posts when they don’t support the blog post’s topic.  We want lively discussion on the topics, but general comments don’t do help the community.  So find answers to general questions you’ve been asking here.  If you don’t find the answer you’re looking for, make a comment anywhere you’d like and we’ll answer it here.

Appreciation

Thanks for all the supportive comments.  We are human and these help us to keep going.  I’ve read them.  I cherish them.  But for the sake of our collective community they’ll never be posted.  Keep making them, anywhere you’d like.  I’ll read them. Smile, and delete them.  Maybe somebody will create way to move the comments from the blog posts to a guest book.  I’d like that.  That way, you can read them too.

Blog Design and Style

This blog is hosted on WordPress.com (not WordPress.org).  It’s all available for free once you register for your free account at www.WordPress.com.  The theme is Ocean Mist.  It’s highly tailorable.  I learned how to make it look like this by reading two books about WordPress.com: one visual and the other step-by-step instructions.  I’m on holiday right now, so I’ll reference the books after I get home for you.

More Information We Publish

Currently, we have two regular websites and this blog website.  We’re in the process of creating a third.  The regular websites are are commercial websites.  The first one is www.BayAreaHomeEnergyAudits.com.  The other is www.BayAreaMoldAssessments.com.  These two sites, by their nature are limited and really don’t lend themselves directly to social media, such as this blog does.  Their focus is for potential local clients to pick up the phone and call us for our services.  The blog, on the other hand, serves all of North America–and perhaps the world.  We will update the blog early and often while leaving our regular websites at the basic information level.

Blog Subscription

Several complaints were made about subscribing to our blog through RSS.  WordPress assures me that all is well with the feed.  So, I removed all unrelated RSS widgets and changed a widget title “Email Subsubscriptions” to “RSS Blog Subscriptions”.  I hope this reduces all the confusion to nothing.

In the process, I figured out WordPress has 4 dedicated ways to provide subscription feeds and an option to choose your own feed application.  The dedicated ones include Outlook, Bloglines, Google, and My Yahoo.  If you decide to choose another feed reader, I hope it works well because I can’t troubleshoot it or get support to troubleshoot it either.  I’ve done my best here. I hope it works.  Definitely, thank you for letting me know there was problem!!!

Opinions

Everybody’s got them.  This forum is about getting the discussion going!  I intentionally don’t try to provide everything I can about a particular blog topic.  I intend to be writing this thing for a very long time!  I want to try to keep the article length between 400-700 words to keep your interest.  You’re busy people!  Please start or continue a discussion under an appropriate blog post.  Let’s get this party started!  Just follow the rules of fair play in our Comment Policy!

In addition. as professionals, we’re going to offer what we believe is best.  Are we biased?  You bet–To the best way to provide real home energy solutions to existing houses!  (We’ve tried a few things that have failed, our seen others do so.)

Posting Frequency

Unless I’m working an extending emergency, expect one every Tuesday and Friday.  I built this blog while responding to the Deep Water Horizon Gulf of Mexico oil spill.  If I fail to deliver on schedule, trust me, I will be back!  Just know that I’m protecting property and people who need my help.

Success Stories

We want to share the successes you’ve had by applying what you’ve learned in our posts.  The more specific, the better.  I’ll probably make out-of-cycle blog posts out of them.  These will help all of us!  If you’ve had failures, let us know so we can help you succeed!

Picture Gallery

I have at least one request to have a gallery page to show all the images on my site.  Shouldn’t need one as there is usually only one picture per post, by design.  If someone could explain how this would serve our community, I might just do it.  I just can’t think of any right now!

Our Sources of Information

We go to school, read lots of books, debate and discuss with pros in our field, listen to our customers and now our blog readers, and most importantly–go out an try to implement what we’ve learned.  Yes, we’ve gone to the school of hard-knocks too.  Personally, I’m an engineer.  It’s gotta make sense in terms of the math and sciences or I ain’t doin’ it or recommend you do it!!!

However, if you want a great book to read that’s easy to understand by homeowners everywhere, read Residential Energy, by John Krigger.  It was the textbook we started with.

Copyright Questions

The words we write are our own.  The pictures may be, but frequently are not.  We don’t mind referencing what we wrote in your blogs or on your website.   Please do so, and a add a link back to the original blog post.  This way, your readers can view the entire article and see the pictures without running afoul with copyright law.

We make every effort to credit our sources for pictures.  We first try to use those provided by governments, as they’re available to everyone.  We also have libraries of pictures we’ve purchased the rights to use.  Some, we try to get permission from the author–if we can find them!  When we can’t, we’ll alert you to that fact by writing “Source Uncertain” in the caption.  As time goes by, we’ll be creating our own libraries, which will be copyrighted too.

Other Types of Media

Our baseline is to include one picture with every post.  However, in time, we’ll use just about every type of available media to us to make things more interesting.