Privacy Policy

Who is responsible

btuwise.com is operated by Honeygoat GmbH, Kägenstrasse 21, 4153 Reinach, Switzerland (commercial register CH-270-4005459-5). Honeygoat GmbH is the controller for the processing described here. Contact: info@btuwise.com. Full company details are on the Legal Notice page.

The site is hosted in Switzerland by Infomaniak Network SA, Geneva. It is aimed at readers in the United States, so this policy leads with US law and then covers European and Swiss law for visitors there.

What btuwise does not do

• No accounts. There is nothing to register for and no login.
• No forms. No contact form, no newsletter sign-up, no quote form, no comments — the site has no input that sends anything to us.
• No cookies of our own. btuwise sets no cookies and writes nothing to your browser's local storage.
• No selling of personal information for money. We do not sell personal information, and we do not sell or transfer it to data brokers.
• No sensitive personal information. We do not collect or ask for it, and none of the calculators require it.
• No profiling with legal effects. Nothing on the site makes an automated decision about you.

The calculators run in your browser

btuwise offers four calculators — BTU sizing, installed cost, running cost and financing. All four are JavaScript that runs on your own device. The square footage, ceiling height, climate zone, electricity rate, loan amount, APR and every other value you enter is processed locally to produce the result on screen. Those values are never sent to our servers, never logged and never stored. Closing the tab discards them.

One detail worth naming: when you move from the sizing calculator to the cost estimator, the BTU figure is carried across in the page address (for example ?btu=12000). That is an equipment size in a URL, not information about you, and it is handled the same way as the rest of the address — see the server logs section below.

What is processed

1. Server logs (hosting)

Like every web server, our host records a log entry for each request in order to deliver pages and keep the service secure and available. A log entry contains the IP address, date and time, the page requested, the referring page, and the browser and operating system reported by your device.

• Purpose: delivering the site, diagnosing errors, and defending against attacks and abuse.
• Legal basis (where the GDPR or Swiss law applies): our legitimate interest in a functioning, secure website.
• Retention: logs are kept short-term by the host for these purposes and then deleted or aggregated.
• Recipient: Infomaniak Network SA, Geneva, Switzerland, as our hosting provider.

2. Analytics

For traffic statistics we use Umami, a cookieless, open-source analytics tool that we run on our own server at analytics.balmac.ch. It counts page views, referrers and rough device categories in aggregate. It sets no cookies, uses no browser fingerprinting, builds no profile of individual visitors and does not track anyone across other websites. We use it to see which guides are read, so we know what to improve.

Because the instance is self-hosted, this is the point that matters most: the statistics stay with us. There is no third-party analytics company receiving your visit, and no advertising network is fed from it.

• Legal basis (GDPR / Swiss law): legitimate interest in understanding site usage, using a tool designed to work without identifying visitors.
• Recipient: none beyond Honeygoat GmbH — the analytics server is operated by us.

3. Advertising

Pages carry display advertising served by Google AdSense (Google LLC and, for users in Europe, Google Ireland Limited). We do not choose the individual ads. To select, deliver, cap the frequency of and measure them, Google and its advertising partners may use cookies, device identifiers or similar technologies, and may process your IP address, the pages you visit on this site, and information about your device and browser.

Where personalized advertising is used, that processing draws on data collected across different websites. In the language of California law, that is a "share" of personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising — even though no money changes hands for the data itself. You can switch it off; see Your choices and rights.

• Purpose: funding a site that is free to read.
• Legal basis (GDPR / Swiss law): consent, obtained through the consent notice Google shows to visitors in those regions; without consent, only non-personalized advertising is served.
• Recipient: Google LLC / Google Ireland Limited. Details are in Google's advertising policy, and you can manage settings at My Ad Center.

4. Affiliate and referral links

Some links lead to retailers, contractor-matching marketplaces or lenders and earn us a commission — the full picture is in the Advertising & Affiliate Disclosure. When you click one, the destination is told that you arrived from btuwise, usually through a tracking parameter in the address or a cookie set by that partner, so a resulting purchase or quote request can be attributed to us.

That processing happens on the partner's site, under the partner's privacy policy, and we receive only aggregate reporting — how many clicks, how many resulting orders and the commission due. We do not receive your name, address, email, phone number or order details. If you go on to request contractor quotes or apply for financing and enter your details there, that company becomes the controller for what you give it, and its policy governs. Read it before you submit anything.

5. Email

If you write to info@btuwise.com, we process your address and the content of your message to answer you. We keep correspondence for as long as it is needed for that purpose and for any follow-up, and we do not add you to a mailing list — there is none.

International transfers

Honeygoat GmbH is in Switzerland and the site is hosted in Switzerland. The advertising and analytics services named above are operated by companies in the United States, so data processed by them may be transferred there. For visitors protected by the GDPR or the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection, those transfers are made on the basis of the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, the EU–US and Swiss–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider participates, and — for advertising — the consent described above.

Children

btuwise is written for adults planning a heating and cooling project. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13 (or under 16 where a higher age applies). If you believe a child has provided personal information through this site, write to info@btuwise.com and we will delete it.

Your choices and rights

Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information

btuwise does not sell personal information. Personalized advertising, however, counts as "sharing" for cross-context behavioral advertising under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA. You can opt out of it in any of these ways:

• Use a Global Privacy Control signal. We honor the GPC browser signal as a valid opt-out request. Browsers and extensions that support it send it automatically — nothing further is needed from you.
• Turn off ad personalization at Google. Open My Ad Center and switch personalized ads off. This applies across sites, not only here.
• Use an industry opt-out. The DAA WebChoices and NAI tools opt you out of participating companies.
• Write to us. Email info@btuwise.com with the subject line "Do Not Sell or Share" and we will action it.

Opting out does not remove advertising; it means the ads you see are selected without cross-site behavioral data. Nothing about your access to this site changes, and we do not discriminate against anyone who exercises a privacy right.

If you are in the United States

California residents have rights under the CCPA/CPRA, and residents of Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Texas, Oregon, Montana and other states have comparable rights under their own laws: to know what personal information is collected and for what purpose, to access it, to have it deleted, to correct it, to opt out of sale, sharing and targeted advertising, and to be free from discrimination for exercising any of them.

For the categories under Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.140, the position is short: btuwise collects identifiers (IP address) and internet activity information (pages viewed, referrer, device and browser), through the hosting, analytics and advertising described above. We collect no other category. Sources are you, in the sense that your browser makes the request. The purposes are delivering and securing the site, understanding usage, and funding it through advertising. There is no sale of personal information, and the only sharing is for personalized advertising as set out above. We do not retain a database of visitors from which an individual could be identified.

To exercise any right, write to info@btuwise.com. We will respond within the period the applicable law requires — 45 days under California law, extendable once where the law permits. Because we hold no account and no identifier that ties a request to a person, verifying a request often means the honest answer is that we hold nothing about you beyond short-term server logs; where that is the case, we will say so plainly and tell you which third-party settings to use instead. An authorized agent may act for you with written proof.

If you are in the EU, EEA, UK or Switzerland

You have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction of processing, data portability and objection under the GDPR, and equivalent rights under the UK GDPR and the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection. Where processing rests on consent, you may withdraw it at any time with effect for the future. Requests go to info@btuwise.com.

You may also lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority — in Switzerland the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC), in the EU the authority of your habitual residence, in the UK the Information Commissioner's Office.

Browser-level controls

Independently of any of the above, your browser lets you block or delete third-party cookies, and most support a "do not track" or anti-tracking mode. Blocking third-party cookies stops most advertising and attribution tracking. The btuwise pages and calculators keep working normally with cookies blocked, since they do not use any.

Security

The site is served exclusively over HTTPS, so traffic between your browser and the server is encrypted. Because btuwise holds no accounts, no passwords, no payment data and no visitor database, there is very little to protect beyond the site itself — the strongest privacy measure here is simply not collecting the data.

Changes to this policy

This policy is updated when the site or the services behind it change — for example if analytics or advertising providers change. The version published here, with the date at the top, is the current one.

Contact

Privacy questions and requests: info@btuwise.com, or by post to Honeygoat GmbH, Kägenstrasse 21, 4153 Reinach, Switzerland. Other ways to reach us are on the Contact page.

Related pages

• Legal Notice — who operates the site
• Terms of Use — the terms on which the site may be used
• Advertising & Affiliate Disclosure — how btuwise earns
• Editorial Policy — how the guides are made and checked
• Accessibility — our accessibility commitment