Privacy Policy

This policy explains what this site collects when you ask about a heating or cooling repair, why each field is there, who your details reach, and how long they are kept. It is written for this site rather than copied from a template, and it is short enough to read while you wait for a call back.

What the request form collects

The form asks for your name, a phone number, an email address, the street address of the property, the city or town, the state, the ZIP code, and an optional description of what the system is doing. It may also put two or three short qualifying questions in front of the contact fields, asking things like whether the heat arrives through vents or radiators and whether anything is running at all, and your answers to those travel with the request.

Five fields are required: your name, a valid US phone number, your email address, the property address and the ZIP code. The city and the state are optional and simply make the first call shorter. The description is optional. The qualifying questions are optional. Nothing else on the form is mandatory, and a request sent with the optional parts left blank works exactly the same way.

The form also carries fields you never see. One records which page of this site you sent the request from. Several record how you arrived: the campaign, medium, keyword or advertising click identifier in the link you followed, the site you came from if it was not this one, and the first page you landed on. One more is a decoy that a real person never fills in, and a submission that comes back with it completed is discarded as automated spam. None of those hidden fields holds anything about you personally.

Why the ZIP code is required

Because a repair is arranged by location, and without a ZIP code a request cannot be matched to anybody and would sit and do nothing. Which contractors will travel to a basement depends on the town, and so does the rulebook. New York does not license this trade at the state level: the Department of State's Division of Building Standards and Codes says that licensing of contractors is not handled by that division and that every city, town, village and county administers the Uniform Code within its own jurisdiction. The City of Syracuse does license it, by class, through a Board of Mechanical Examiners. Your ZIP code decides which of those answers applies to your address, and that is the whole reason the field will not let you past it.

The property address, why it is asked last, and the one place it never goes

The address does one job: it puts the right contractor in front of the right system. A ZIP code says who can reach you. The street line says which house, which is what somebody needs before they can say anything useful about how the appliance is likely to be vented, whether the property sits inside the city line, or which municipal office issues the permit if one is needed. It is asked for on the last step of the form, after the questions about the system, because it is the highest-friction field on the page and asking for it first loses people who would otherwise finish.

It is held, shared and deleted on exactly the same terms as everything else described here, with one deliberate exception. If a request ever fails to deliver, the error log records only whether an address was given, never any part of it, because a street line and a ZIP code together name a house and the people living in it. A partly redacted address is not private, it is only slower to read.

What we do not ask for

We do not ask your age, your income, your household, whether you own or rent, or anything at all about your finances. We do not ask for a card number, because nothing is paid for through this site. There is no login and no account to create. Where a page mentions a state benefit that pays toward a heating repair, it sends you to the county office that administers it; this site takes no part in that application and collects nothing for it.

Visits, and what is measured

The arrival details described above are written once per visit into your browser's own session storage and read back when you submit the form. They are gone when you close the tab, they never leave your browser until you press the button, and they say where a request came from rather than who sent it.

This site runs no analytics tag, no advertising pixel and no third-party visitor tracker today. If one is ever added, this policy is updated in the same edit that adds it, because a measurement tag changes the honest answer to what this site collects.

Cookies and third parties

These are flat static pages. They set no cookies of their own and no advertising cookies. Two typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts, which means your browser requests those font files from Google when a page opens, and ordinary web server logs record page requests the way every web server does.

Who your details reach

The form posts to an address on this site called /submit, which is handled by a small piece of code running at the edge of the network rather than by a page. That code creates your request as a contact in GoHighLevel, the customer records system used to follow a job from the first call through to the work being booked, tagged with this site's own domain so it is clear where it came from. If that system cannot be reached, the request is emailed to us instead so that nothing is lost, and if every delivery route fails the page tells you so and asks you to email rather than thanking you for a request that did not arrive. From there your details go to the licensed, insured contractor or contractors we introduce you to, so that they can look at the system and price the work. A job that turns out to be two trades, a heating appliance plus a chimney or an electrical fault for instance, may reach two companies for that reason. We do not sell your details, we do not trade them, and we do not add you to mailing lists about anything other than the repair you asked about.

How long it is kept

A request is kept for as long as it is useful to the job you asked about and to any follow up arising from it, and is then deleted. Heating work here runs on a season rather than a week: on the 1991-2020 normals the seven months from October through April account for 6,168 of Syracuse's 6,651 annual heating degree days, so a request made in October is often still live in March. That is why a record is not thrown away the moment the first call ends. Ask for yours to be deleted sooner and it will be. A contractor you were introduced to keeps their own record under their own terms, and deleting ours does not delete theirs, so ask them directly as well.

Your choices

You can ask what is held about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for it to be deleted. You can tell any contractor you were introduced to that you do not want to be contacted again, and that instruction stands on its own whatever we hold. You can also simply leave the optional fields blank.

Getting in touch about this policy

Use the request form and say that your message is about privacy, or call the number in the header if one is shown. Both arrive in the same place and both get answered.