Tuesday, February 3, 2009

An Easy, Common Sense Choice

I was surfing the Internet today and found a group of ads that was running on almost every search engine I looked at. What got me about the ads was that they were kind of annoying. I ended up looking into one of them and what I found was surprising. It was common sense.

The ad asked "Would you pay $3 per gallon for gas when it's selling for under $2?" My first thought was "What a stupid question." Of course nobody would pay and extra dollar per gallon for gas. I was indignant when I was thinking about it at first. What was the point?

When an ad says something like that to begin with it makes you wonder what the point is going to be. The next line of the ad was "You're Doing It Right Now With Your Heating Bills." Okay, now I'm a little more interested but I want proof. This particular ad was for replacement windows and it went on to make its case!

Think about this analogy. We all drive an extra few miles to get gas where it's three cents per gallon cheaper. We watch the signs and most people notice the fluctuation as the prices go up and down and back up, only usually a little further. Anyway, we may put fifteen gallons of gas in our cars so we probably save a little under fifty cents filling up at the cheaper gas station. let's say you fill up twice a week. By golly you've saved a whole four bucks this month and you're darn proud of it!

There is a replacement window company called Preservation Windows that has a 33% Heating and Cooling Fuel Savings Guarantee. They actually have a money-back guarantee if you don't save 33% of your fuel usage over the previous year. It seems like no big deal unless your an analytical sort like me.

At work today we had a meeting and the question was asked about how much the heating bills were last month for everyone. They ranged from $740 down to $390. One thing they all had in common was that they were their highest heating bills ever. Holy cow. That means these people could save from $129-$244 per month by installing Preservation Windows. No matter how you look at it these folks could save $750 to $1,500 per year by installing these windows.

The bottom line is that people go to great lengths to save $4 per month on gasoline but very few seem to care about the hundreds, if not thousands of dollars they are wasting by keeping their old windows. the next time I hear someone talk about how cheap gas is down the street I'm going to ask them how their windows perform.