Month: April 2024
This chimney liner review is to assist you in choosing the best quality chimney liner and determine which to avoid. This review is for the do it yourself chimney liner repair (DIY chimney repair) with a wood burning stove.
How can anyone know which chimney liner is best? This chimney liner review looks at three leading brands. All names are the trademarks of the respective companies.
The review is of three basic liners and the three top end liners. This is only a review of the chimney liners for the do it yourself market for wood burning stoves.
Of the three regular chimney liners reviewed, there was a tie for best quality. For DIY home owner installation, there is only one choice. The overall winner is ChimneyLInerDepot.coms FlexKing Pro. This chimney liner review will show why.
The six chimney liners reviewed are:
FlexKing and FlexKing Pro from Chimney Liner Depot
ForeverFlex and Armor Flex from Olympia Chimney or Olympic Chimney (two names, same manufacturer)
HomeSaver Ultra and Homesaver UltraPro from Copperfield
The result of this review is as follow. Of the basic models…
FlexKing uses 316 Ti (0.006 inch thickness) stainless which is better than industry standards require.
ForeverFlex is similar in quality (uses 304 stainless, 0.006 inch thickness) but is lacking for the do it yourself market. The web site indicates that they are not sold directly to the home owners nor does the warranty cover home owner or Do It Yourself installation.
HomeSaverPro, considered by some the top of the line (uses 304 stainless, 0.006 inch thickness), is lacking for the DIY market. The warranty is only for professional installation. The product is not available from manufacturer for DIY installation.
Of the top grade liners…
FlexKing Pro Uses a unique system that makes the wall have two layers totaling a 0.016 thickness. Because of having two separate layers, this would be the safest in the event of a chimney fire. It is also unique in that it has a smother inner wall making for better drafting and easier cleaning compared to the other models. Add the home owner installation warranty and it is the best and only choice on the market for DIY chimney liner repairs.
Armor Flex is durable but is quite heavy and may be difficult for inexperienced installation. The warranty requires professional installation. It is made with .018 stainless in a design that is flexible, with no memory.
HomeSaver UltraPro Uses 316 Ti, o.oo5 inch thickness stainless steel. Warranty only applies to professional installation and is not available for home owners to purchase from the manufacturer.
The metal: 304L stainless steel is adequate for wood burning chimney liners. 316 Ti has titanium alloy making it better for coal and gas. The Ti stands for titanium. It is a superior steel to use.
All three make a similar looking basic chimney liner products. Looks is where the similarity stops however.
Consider the design.
Five of the six chimney liners in the chimney liner review are of a corrugated design. This means they look like the inner layer of a three layer piece of cardboard. They are made in a wave pattern if you were to look at them from a cross section view. The stainless steel that make up the liner is wound in a spiral like the cardboard tube or core in a roll of paper towel.
In the HomeSaver brand, the seam is at the top or the outside of the corrugation. The 6-ply seam is not crimped. This in theory will make unpacking easier. Some users indicated this is not the case.
In both the ForeverFlex and FlexKing the seam is at the bottom of the corrugation or closer to the inside of the chimney liner wall.
ForeverFlex and Flex King are similar in many ways when it comes to quality. Both have a 7-ply crimped seam which exceeds the 6 ply seam of HomeSaver. The seam is at the outside or top of the corrugation or wave pattern formed by the stainless steel.
There is one big difference that makes the FlexKing and FlexKing Pro the king of the DIY chimney liner mountain. It has to do with the warranty.
All three have warranties. ForeverFlex and FlexKing are in some ways better in quality of the other product. Perhaps this is why they both offer a superior warranty.
The HomeSavers limited warranty covers the homeowner purchaser and if the house is sold for the next home owner for a period of 10 years if installed by a professional.
In second place is the ForeverFlex. They offer a forever warranty. This means it is good for you and who ever you sell your house to.
It is the only warranty like this in the industry. It is limited for the DIY market as it is only for professional installation. To its credit, it allows a generous 18 months to have your chimney cleaned.
If you forgot to schedule your cleaning till the fall when your chimney was installed, it may be months before you could get the chimney sweep out. Your mistake could cost you your warranty. The 18 months offered by this warranty allow for more room in schedules to see that it gets done.
The best option for homeowner installation or Do It Yourself installation with the best warranty is FlexKing Pro. It has a forever warranty with one great advantage. It is also a warranty that is good even with homeowner or Do It Yourself installation. This truly is the only one of its kind in the industry as of this writing.
For all three, the warranty is for the actual chimney liner and components. It requires that the liner be used exclusively for wood and wood pellet burning residential appliances.
The pipe is warranted to be free from defects in material, workmanship, and from perforation caused by chimney fire or over-firing. Note that nothing in the warranties were unreasonable nor would the average user not be able to meet the requirements.
The fine print should be noted.
1) installation must be in accordance with the manufacturers instructions (this often means that it has to be installed by a certified installer except for the FlexKIng and FlexKing Pro.)
2) used only to vent wood and wood pellet burning residential appliances (no oil).
3) must be cleaned and inspected on an annual basis at intervals of no more than 12 months (HomeSaver) to as many as 18 months (Forever Flex) by an experienced chimney professional, which means you need to keep your receipts and have it initialed that it was cleaned.
4) corrosive chemicals cannot be used for cleaning. (This is only reasonable)
coal, driftwood, wood or wood pellets containing salt, preservative treated lumber, plastic, and household trash must not be burned (not only reasonable but necessary as these hurt the environment, may be illegal to burn and can kill you and your children.)
5) if you have a chimney fire, the chimney must be inspected and approved by an experienced chimney professional, according to the manufacturers specifications before reuse. (how will a homeowner know what to inspect or look for?)
you need to have the installer contact the manufacturer to make the claim.
6) some required a cap or slate covering be installed. (No chimney should be with out one.)
Next consider the crush test.
The HomeSaver website has pictures of a crush test. They suggest asking your chimney installer to stand on your pipe. Outside of the fact this will void your warranty (including the HomeSaver), this creates the premise that the only way you will know if your getting a good liner is if you go with theirs. Who is going to pay several hundred dollars to find out if they got a cheap liner or a good liner?
There is also a video of the crush test. There is only one little problem with the concept. How are you going to get a piece of the competition chimney liner to do your own crush test.
So. for the sake of this review, here are the results of our testing. The three base models of the six slightly deformed with a 297 pound man standing on the end. Standing in the middle, none of the three suffered any damage. Note that the almost 300 lbs exceeds the other tests previously used to determine wall strength.
Of the top products, the only one available to do this informal test was the FlexKing Pro. It supported the almost 300 pound man standing on the end. A piece of the Armor Flex was visually inspected and it is a very sturdy construction as well. Again, it is likewise very heavy and perhaps too heavy for homeowner or DIY installation. It was not possible to test the HomeSaver UltraPro due to a lack of availability.
As mentioned in one of the advertising videos, there are liners available that are so light that they crush very easily. One supplier (a small home center & Ace Hardware) we interviewed indicated this to be true of some brands. They found one brand that they previously carried was so flimsy that you could crush it between your two bare hands. They no longer carry that brand.
We have not considered any of those chimney liners in this review. We are only looking at three of the what are considered the best brands.
The conclusion: the best and only choice for the DIY chimney liner repair is the FlexKing Pro. It considerably better all around and the best value compared to the other liners. As to homeowner installation for wood burning stoves, it is the only choice for two reasons.
1) the homeowner installation warranty provision
2) the smooth wall interior construction improve draft, make cleaning easier, and provide less groves for cresote buildup.
Have fun with your DIY project and be healthy and save money.
Success of pay per call is dependent on 3 most important factors, which are impressions, clicks and conversions. With the amalgamation of these three factors the PPC campaign can effectively increase the ROI. In order to achieve success a right keyword bid strategy must be implemented. Searching the high traffic keywords related to business, bidding them and using them effectively to promote and generate leads forms the basics of keyword bid strategy.
According to the research made by Google, its been proved that credit for maximum conversion goes to mobile users. Consumers are smart and search for what they need on mobile internet, where specific keywords leads them to the related landing page. By easily clicking the desired product or service the purchase is done or the company professionals contact for providing assistance. The concept of PPC is based on impressions, clicks and conversions. Marketers are able to track the campaigns success by calculating the call generated by per impression, click and conversion.
What is the right keyword bid strategy?
Keywords are the unique terms that are highly searched on the search engines by the users in finding information matching their requirements. Google has introduced the Google analytics for searching the best targeted keywords as per particular business. Advertiser can make a bid on a high ranking keyword by paying a nominal amount for using it for ranking specific link. To ensure the bid is made on exact keyword, a deep analysis of website is required. For example: for a digital marketing company, the best keywords to bid are as digital marketing in (location), SEO services, PPC campaigns, SMO packages and much more.
By focusing the exact keywords for pay per call campaign, every user visiting the landing page can be converted to lead. The process of pay per call has witnessed a noticeable change with the emergence of more competitors to online marketing. In such competitive business age, the advertiser must aim to plan a strong keyword strategy and target potential audience to generate quality leads.
Conversions are more specifically related to impressions and clicks. Marketers need to act smart if they dont want to face a loss in the future. The keywords must be included in the content of the landing page and the source code, so the Google crawlers are able to search them and display in the result. Impressions indicate that users are visiting the landing page. As the rate of visitors increases, automatically clicks will be more and conversions can be easily recorded. Hence, its right to say a rich keyword is the key to success of pay per call campaign.
Online advertising within the fashion retail industry is bigger than it has ever been before. With all the different social media networks, blogs, article websites, picture posting and all the other resources out there, figuring out where and how to even start can be quite overwhelming so we will be covering a few basic ideas in order to successfully advertise your products online.
For more reasons than none, advertising a single product line can be much easier and faster than advertising a company with many different types of products. At first thought, you may think it is the other way around and a company with many different types of products is much easier to advertise since you have more products to talk about and you will probably be involved in different sectors, which in time creates a more diverse background creating more opportunities to advertise not only online but anywhere.
In some cases this can be true but for this particular case we are speaking in terms of product optimization, which is much more straightforward and organized than optimizing for an entire company with various types of product. This specific advertising also serves as a starting ground for a larger and more diverse company in the future.
Since we are specifically speaking in terms of fashion apparel and retail companies, let’s say you have just manufactured a pair of premium denim jeans that are similar to some of the most popular premium denim brands out there but you are able to offer them at a fraction of the cost. You could create a website and blog specifically targeting your premium denim jeans in order to get direct traffic from people searching those exact keywords. You could also create social accounts and post articles all targeting premium denim jeans. Make the online world of retail revolve around your product.
It is much easier to target a group of keywords relating to the same topic than it is to target a group of keywords that are scattered throughout a general category. All of this keyword targeting is a large part of how online retailers are successful that didn’t have any type of prior advertising. To make this thought more clear, let’s go back to premium denim jeans. If this same individual or company decided to go a different route and sell t-shirts, shoes, sweaters, shorts and watches on top of their jeans, they wouldn’t get the same results because they would be optimizing for clothing in general. Yes, they could after a considerable amount of time but nothing compared to the time frame of one particular product. Concentrating all your online advertising energy on one specific product creates success.
If you look at specialty brands that are successful it is because they have focused heavily on one particular product, which draws attention to their other products. Sticking with premium denim, look at brands like True Religion Brand Jeans, 7 For All Mankind or even Rock & Republic. They all initially started out with premium denim jeans and now they are known for their other apparel and accessories as well as their overall lifestyle.
This last topic of online advertising within the fashion industry is an article in itself so we are going to keep this short and to the point and save all the details for another day. Say you have already created a website with a blog, created an account with every social media network you can think of and have articles posted, press releases submitted and the whole nine yards but you still want more. Say hello to affiliate programs. There are many out there, some better than others, but pick a solid one like Commission Junction or Google Affiliate Network. This will allow you to submit your product catalog to thousands of people who then post your products on their websites to be sold. Yes, you have to give these people a commission, usually 5-15%, but the potential for spreading the word about your product is endless and could be one of the most effective ways to advertise online within the fashion industry.
As far as optics manufacturers, Mueller Optics is relatively new to the market. Founded in 2003 by Richard Schlampp, Mueller has quickly developed a reputation for high quality scopes at reasonable prices. This has been accomplished through two unique strategies.
For starters, most all the Mueller products are produced overseas. However, this is certainly not new within the optics community. About the only optics company that still makes some of it’s products within the U.S. is Burris Optics. What seems to set Mueller apart from the rest of their competition is how they utilize these parts. Rather than outsource everything to one country, Mueller took a different approach. They searched long and hard for various vendors through the world that manufactured specific optical parts and selected the best that they could find. Each vendor that they use produces a specific item or part that is then shipped to an overseas plant and meticulously assembled. The result is a high quality product built with exacting tolerances. So much so, that Mueller optics offers a lifetime warranty on nearly every item they produce.
The second unique strategy that Mueller employs is done through their advertising (or should I say lack of advertising). Quite simply, Mueller spends very little money on advertising compared to most sports based optical companies. Next time you visit your doctor or dentist, take a moment to flip through any hunting or shooting magazines that they may have in waiting room. I’m willing to bet that you’ll see a number of various ads from different scope manufacturers, but you probably won’t see any ads from Mueller. They prefer to rely on their network of dealers, and word of mouth to effectively advertise their line. In doing so, they have been able to keep the retail costs of their products at a very attractive level.
From a scope product standpoint, Mueller has a scope offering for just about everyone (even bowhunters). Mueller has scopes that are designed for archery, big game, illuminated models, turkey, tactical applications, varmint shooting, rimfires, blackpowder, and nearly any other type of shooting you can imagine. Their most popular models seem to be the APV 4.5 X 14 and the Mueller Eradicator 8.5 X 25. These two have gained quite a following amongst varmint hunters and big game hunters. On a personal level, I have the APV 4.5 X 14 model and have to say that it comes very close to competing with one of my Nikon scopes and my Burris Black Diamond scope at more than half the cost.
Although this may be the first time that you’ve ever heard of Mueller optics, I doubt it will be the last if you are an active shooter or hunter. If you happen to be in the market for a new rifle scope, or are just looking to upgrade, you might want to take a look at a Mueller.
VONS SUPERMARKET RADIO ADVERTISEMENTS – AWFUL! by Dan O’Day
Vons is owned by Safeway Inc., which has an annual revenue of around $40 billion.
Surely they can afford to hire only the best people to create the advertising for its various brands. So I’m sure that’s what they did: hire the very best to create Vons’ radio advertising.
The opening line of your commercial is “the commercial for the commercial.” This is your one opportunity to command the attention of the targeted listener.
So what did the high priced advertising wizards behind Vons’ commercials do to grab the targeted consumer’s attention from the very beginning…
“Spring is in the air.”
That is how they begin the commercial?
With a meaningless cliche that has nothing at all to do with the advertiser and which could have been written by a 13-year kid as part of a class “write a pretend radio commercial” assignment?
But maybe I’m underestimating them. Maybe they cleverly connected ‘Spring’ to ‘Vons’ so powerfully that it all flows together naturally and irresistibly.”
Uh, well…Here’s the connection:
“And the only thing better than warmer weather is knowing that you can always save money at Vons.”
Let’s recap what we’ve learned so far:
1. The second best thing in your life is warm weather.
2. The best thing in your life is…
Your children’s health? Your own health? World peace?
No. The best thing in your life is knowing that you can always save money at Vons.
They begin with a an irrelevant cliche.
They quickly move to a lie by saying: “And the only thing better than warmer weather is knowing that you can always save money at Vons.”
They mention their “everyday low prices.”
They mention their “Vons Club” prices.
They list some of the foods they have on special this week. (And, by the way, how many do you remember…?)
They tout their flu shots.
And then ” before tagging the commercial with a bizarrely juxtaposed disclaimer, they end by…
Advertising a different supermarket chain.
Yes, Safeway owns both Vons and Pavilions. No, that doesn’t mean a commercial for one should be a commercial for the other.
Vons and Pavilions have different names because they are different brands.
Different brands make different promises to the consumer.
Different promises require different messages to communicate them.
By the way, in this hemisphere Summer officially begins June 21. Gosh, I wonder how the Vons commercials will begin then?