Morgul Marketing

    Social media for Atlanta HVAC companies, filmed in crawlspaces and attics

    Atlanta hands an HVAC company two rooms and neither one is friendly to a camera. Half the equipment worth showing is under an intown house in red clay dust, and the rest is in an attic that has been baking since early morning. Outdoors, mature hardwoods break the light into hard patches a phone cannot expose for. Then traffic eats the back of the day, so whatever the crew did not shoot before lunch does not get shot at all. Work out the light, the timing and the single take you are going to get, and this metro holds better material than almost anywhere. Skip that and the folder fills up with clips nobody can use.

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    A crawlspace and an August attic are the two rooms your camera lives in

    Nearly every filmable moment here happens in one of two hostile spaces, and each allows exactly one attempt.

    Inside the Perimeter the ducts are under the house. A technician on his knees in a crawlspace has a headlamp, one free hand and no room to back up, so the clip that survives is short, close and shot before anything gets pulled apart.

    Nobody reshoots a crawlspace. Whatever the phone caught on the way in is what you have, and red clay dust filming over the lens is the most common reason otherwise good footage is unusable.

    Outside the Perimeter the air handler sits in an attic that has been heating since the sun came up. Assume one take, get it in the first minute up there, and be back down the ladder before the heat makes the decision for the crew.

    Both rooms reward narration over pictures. There is not enough light or room for the image to carry the point on its own, so the technician has to say what he is looking at while he is still looking at it.

    A clip light that clamps onto a joist costs less than an hour of labor and rescues more crawlspace footage than any phone upgrade ever will.

    Hardwood shade wrecks more outdoor clips than shaky hands do

    A mature canopy puts most of the condensers in this metro under moving patches of hard light that a phone cannot handle on its own.

    Dappled shade under old hardwoods is the hardest light there is. The phone meters for the bright patch and the equipment goes black, or it meters for the equipment and the yard behind it blows out white.

    Work with it instead of against it. Tap the screen on the unit and lock the exposure before anybody starts talking, or move to the open shade on the north side of the house where the light is even.

    Morning is kinder than afternoon in a canopy yard, which happens to line up with when the crew is there anyway.

    The canopy also hands you the subject. Coils packed with leaf litter, a condenser sitting under a limb that should have come down two years ago, debris in a cabinet that explains a capacity complaint the moment you point at it.

    Shoot the cleanup rather than the complaint. A rinsed coil beside the pile of what came out of it is the entire argument for maintenance, and it works with no voiceover at all.

    Traffic decides what hour of the day the footage gets shot

    The workday here is eaten from the back, so anything not filmed by early afternoon does not get filmed.

    A crew finishing in Sandy Springs at four in the afternoon is not in a filming mood, because the drive to the next call and then home is about to take longer than the job did.

    So the camera comes out on the morning call. Set the expectation there rather than on the last job of the day, and the footage actually arrives.

    It also decides which jobs are candidates at all. The first job of the day and anything close to the shop are realistic. A late call in Alpharetta with a run back toward Decatur waiting behind it is not, however good the equipment story looks.

    Do not let the drive turn one job into two visits. The finished shot has to happen before the truck leaves, because nobody is coming back across GA-400 for a photograph.

    Dispatch is what makes this work. If the board knows which job is the shoot, the crew gets ten minutes of slack instead of being asked to find it in a day that has none.

    Pollen season is the rare stretch where a camera shows the whole argument

    For a few weeks everything outdoors wears a yellow coat, and it is the only time this trade gets a before and after a phone can capture honestly.

    Most HVAC results are invisible. A charge is correct or it is not, a duct leaks or it does not, and none of that photographs.

    Pollen is different. A coil, a cabinet, a filter and a return grille all wear it, and every homeowner in the metro is already staring at the same yellow film on the car in the driveway.

    Shoot the pair. The unit as found, the rinse, the unit afterward, and the filter held up next to a fresh one. No music, no script, and no claim about what any of it saves anybody.

    It is also the easiest time of year to get a customer to agree to filming, because they can see the problem themselves and usually want a copy of the picture.

    What happens after the footage exists, from choosing where to put it to deciding what deserves money behind it, works the same in Brookhaven as it does anywhere else in the country, and we have set that part out on our HVAC social media page.

    Questions we get

    Nobody wants to hold a phone in an August attic. Do we just skip that footage?
    Shoot it on the way up, in the first minute, before the heat decides for you. One steady clip of the air handler and the ductwork with the technician saying what he sees is enough. If the attic work is going to run an hour, get the picture first and then work, because the second attempt never happens.
    Our crawlspace clips are too dark to use. What actually fixes that?
    A clamp light on a joist and a wipe of the lens. A headlamp on its own blows out one hot circle and leaves everything around it black, and red clay dust films over a phone camera within minutes under an intown house. Neither fix costs anything worth discussing at a company meeting.
    Should we post about traffic and arrival windows?
    Yes, and be specific about it. Saying that an afternoon call inside the Perimeter can slip is honest, and honesty about scheduling is unusual enough here to be remembered. What we would avoid is publishing a firm response time you cannot hold, because you will be measured against it on the worst afternoon of the year rather than an average one.
    Storm weeks are our best material and our worst schedule. What is the minimum worth capturing?
    Two photographs from one phone. The damaged unit as found and the same unit after. A limb through a condenser or a crushed disconnect needs no video and no commentary, and a crew running long days can still manage two stills. Ask the homeowner first, and keep the house out of the frame if they would rather.
    Is pollen season footage too ugly to post?
    The ugliness is the appeal. Everybody in the metro is looking at the same yellow coat on their own car, so a fouled coil reads instantly in a way almost nothing else in this trade does. Show it as found, show it clean, and leave the sales pitch off the end.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

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