These guides cover the three skills every HVAC photo programme depends on: shooting a job so the photos tell a story, asking homeowners properly before the camera comes out, and getting rid of stock images that undermine trust. Each one is written to be useful even if you never hire us. Each takes about ten minutes to read and ends with steps you can start this week.
We are a marketing service for HVAC companies, not a contractor. Everything here is about documenting and presenting your own work.
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The HVAC job-site shot list: twelve frames for every install
Twelve frames, taken at natural pauses in the job, give you a complete before-and-after story for any install. This guide lists them in order, with variations by job type.
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Photo consent and privacy basics for HVAC work in customers' homes
Ask before you shoot, write the answer down, keep anything that identifies the household out of frame, and remove photos when asked. Here is how to do each step well.
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Replacing stock photos with your own HVAC work, page by page
Stock images presented as your jobs mislead buyers and weaken trust. Audit every image, label or remove the stock, and replace it with real, consented job photos over 90 days.
The HVAC job-site shot list
The job-site shot list guide lays out twelve frames for a typical install, grouped by arrival, work in progress and finish, and explains why each one earns its place. It also covers variations for boilers, heat pumps, ductless systems, water heaters and maintenance visits.
What you will learn:
- the three phone settings to fix before anyone takes a photo, including location tagging
- which three frames to keep if a technician only manages a few on a busy day
- a file-naming pattern that links every image to its job and consent record
- a worked example of how many publishable sets a small crew produces in a year
Photo consent and privacy in customers' homes
The consent guide explains how to ask permission at the door, how to record the answer, and what to keep out of frame. It summarises the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada's guidance on meaningful consent in plain language and translates it into a technician's routine.
What you will learn:
- template wording a technician can use in one breath, with placeholders for your company name
- a do-not-shoot list covering faces, address clues, screens, reflections and metadata
- how to handle tenants, multi-unit buildings, commercial sites and a hesitant partner
- a four-step process for removing a photo when a customer asks
Replacing stock photos on an HVAC website
The stock photo guide explains why stock images presented as your work mislead buyers, what the Competition Bureau and Google say, and how to replace them over 90 days without leaving pages bare.
What you will learn:
- a five-status audit sheet for every image on your site and profile
- which images to remove this week, even before replacements exist
- the order to replace images in, from home page hero to location pages
- a 90-day plan with a worked example for a 40-image site
How the guides fit together
The guides follow the same order as a real rollout. Consent comes first because nothing should be published without it. The shot list comes next because it fills your library. The stock-photo swap comes last because it depends on having real images to put in place.
Each guide links to the matching service if you would rather have the routine built for you: the job-site photo system, the consent and privacy workflow and before-and-after galleries.
Regional notes
Some details change by province. Quebec customers should be offered French consent wording and French captions; heat pump photos in snow carry more weight in the Prairies than on the BC coast; Atlantic oil-to-heat-pump conversions make strong before-and-after pairs. The areas page covers these differences province by province.
How to use the guides with your team
The guides work best when someone owns them. Pick one person in the office, usually whoever handles the website or the Google profile, to read all three and decide what changes first.
A simple rollout looks like this:
- Read the consent guide and agree the one sentence technicians will say at the door.
- Share the shot list section for your most common job type with the crews, and try it for two weeks.
- Run the stock-photo audit on your website while the first real sets come in.
- Review progress after a month: how many jobs have photos, how many have a recorded yes, and how many stock images are gone.
Questions about the guides
If something in a guide does not fit how your company works, call, text or email. We are glad to say how we would adapt it, and you can see what working together costs on the pricing page.
Frequently asked questions
Which guide should we read first?
Read the consent guide first if your team does not ask homeowners before taking photos. Otherwise start with the shot list, because it changes what your technicians bring back from every job.
Can we share these guides with our technicians?
Yes. The shot list guide in particular is written so a technician can read the relevant section on a phone. Link to it from your internal notes.
Are the guides legal advice?
No. The consent and stock-photo guides summarise public guidance from the Privacy Commissioner and the Competition Bureau. For your own obligations, ask a lawyer in your province.