Morgul Marketing

    Social media for HVAC companies working the Front Range

    A Front Range HVAC company posts for a month, sees nothing, and quits. Usually the plan was borrowed from a humid market, where cooling means one box on a slab and the air inside a house behaves itself. Denver does not work that way. A large share of the metro cools with an evaporative unit sitting on a roof, winter air at altitude is dry enough to split trim, and the ground under a great many of these houses swells and shrinks with the weather. Those conditions decide what a shop here can put on camera, and they are the whole of what follows.

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    Spring startup and fall shutdown put homeowners on a roof with their own cooling

    Two rituals a year send people up a ladder to handle equipment they do not understand, and both arrive at your counter as questions.

    In spring a large part of this metro is on a roof firing up an evaporative cooler. In fall the same people are draining it, pulling the pads and covering the housing. Few of them do either job well, and the questions come in waves.

    Film the startup in a real house with the pads in your hand. Pad replacement, the bleed line, what a pump sounds like just before it quits. A clip like that gets re-watched every April without anybody touching it again.

    Shutdown is the better shoot, because it ends at a furnace. A homeowner on the roof in October is already thinking about heat, and a clip that runs the two jobs together makes the maintenance visit obvious rather than a sales pitch.

    The most useful thing you publish all year may be what happens when a swamp cooler gets fired up with the water still off, or covered in the fall with the line still charged. Your technicians see the result of both every season, and a homeowner would rather watch two minutes than pay for that repair.

    The cooler is on the roof, so every shot starts at the top of a ladder

    Where the equipment sits decides how footage gets made here, long before anybody argues about what to post.

    An evaporative cooler is on the roof, which puts the camera on the roof too, and rules out a tripod, a second pair of hands and most of what a production checklist assumes.

    Plan for one hand. The phone goes in a pocket for the climb, comes out braced against the housing, and the clip runs as long as the free hand allows. Short is not a style decision up there.

    Wind at altitude ruins audio that sounded fine in the yard. Either narrate later over silent footage or turn so the wind is behind you before saying anything worth keeping.

    Sun is the other problem. Glare at this elevation blows out a phone screen and a bright roof deck at the same time, so shoot with the sun behind the camera and check the frame before coming down. Nobody is climbing back up for a second take.

    Winter at altitude pulls the moisture out of a house and nobody blames the furnace

    Dry air is the complaint homeowners here live with all winter and rarely connect to the equipment running in the basement.

    Cracked hands, static, split trim, a sore throat every morning. Homeowners in Capitol Hill and Congress Park describe all of it to your technicians and hardly any of them mention humidity.

    A short clip on whole-house humidification, what it costs to add during a changeout, and why a tabletop unit is not the same machine, answers a question people have been asking each other for years.

    Combustion setup at altitude belongs in the same set. Equipment arrives from the factory expecting thicker air, and somebody who moved here from sea level has never heard it said out loud. Keep it on the physics rather than on a house nobody has seen.

    Material like this ages well because the condition does not change. Low humidity is a feature of living a mile up, so the clip filmed this January is still true several winters from now.

    The ground under the pad moves, and the repair is worth filming

    Expansive soil along the Front Range lifts and drops whatever you set on it, and the result reads clearly on camera.

    Bentonite swells when it takes on water and shrinks when it dries, so a condenser pad set level in June can be sitting at an angle by the following spring. Homeowners notice the tilt and assume somebody did sloppy work.

    Show the correction. Lifting the unit, rebuilding the base, re-supporting a line set that got pulled tight while the pad moved. It is a short job, it photographs well, and it names a condition most people have lived with without knowing the word for it.

    Ductwork in a crawlspace tells the same story. A foundation that has shifted crushes a boot or opens a joint, and a room that will not heat gets blamed on the furnace. Footage from under the floor settles that faster than any paragraph.

    Write this one out as well as filming it. Expansive soil is a Denver County and Jefferson County conversation people already half know from their own foundations, and hearing it applied to mechanical work is new to almost everybody.

    The parts of a social plan that hold in any market, from who should be holding the camera to what deserves money behind it, we wrote up once.

    Questions we get

    Is there really an audience for swamp cooler video?
    There is. Every house with one has an owner who handles it twice a year and mostly guesses, and the guessing produces the calls your office takes every April. A clip that shows a pad change, a bleed line and what a tired pump sounds like answers most of what those callers wanted to know, and it stays useful season after season.
    How do we film work that happens on a roof?
    One hand, short takes, and a plan made before the ladder. Decide in the yard which two or three shots are worth having, brace the phone against the housing rather than holding it out, and expect wind at altitude to ruin anything recorded up there. Narrating afterward over silent footage is usually easier than fighting it.
    How much can we say about dry air without diagnosing a house we have not seen?
    Plenty, as long as you stay on the physics rather than the address. What low humidity does to trim, skin and static is the same in every house on the Front Range. What a particular house needs depends on its size, its ductwork and how it leaks, and saying that plainly on camera reads as honesty rather than a dodge.
    A customer's condenser pad has settled and tilted. Is that worth showing?
    Yes, because expansive soil is a shared Denver experience and few people connect it to mechanical work. Show the tilt, the lift and the rebuilt base. Homeowners who have watched their own foundation move recognize what they are looking at immediately, and it reframes a repair they might otherwise read as a warranty argument.
    Can we just repost what our equipment manufacturer sends?
    Some of it, as filler. It will not carry the plan, because every dealer in Denver County has the same file sitting in the same folder. The posts that earn attention here show your hands, your trucks and houses that look like the reader's. Manufacturer material works best as a caption you rewrite, not as the plan itself.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

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