DOE's five winter tips as a five-clip series for an HVAC shop

The U.S. Department of Energy's winter article gives five tips: seal windows, check the furnace filter every month, upgrade appliances where rebates exist, use a programmable thermostat, and reverse ceiling fans to run clockwise at low speed. An HVAC or home-services shop can post one tip a week as a short captioned clip. Five clips cost $1.10 on Sume at the flat trim and caption rates.

The five tips and their exact wording

The article gives no thermostat degrees and no percentages, so a clip should not either. Use the tip, show the action and stop.

One action per clip, one clip per week

Film each tip as a real job at a customer-permitted site or in your own shop. For the filter, a hand sliding out a dirty filter and holding it to the light. For fans, a hand flipping the direction switch and a shot of the blades. Eight seconds each is enough.

Spreading five clips over five weeks gives a shop a reason to post weekly in November and December without new shoots.

Cut and caption

Record a single 90-second take of all five and cut with video trim at start and duration. Each trim is $0.02. Then burn the tip as a caption with cues using video captions, $0.20 for clips up to 60 seconds.

Cues skip transcription, so there is no chance a noisy shop produces a wrong word. The caption is your wording, and that is where you put the shop's phone number as the last card.

Where it goes wrong

Shops overreach by quoting savings. The article has none, so skip them. Another trap is a filter clip that says "change monthly": the article says check monthly, and replace at minimum quarterly. Say exactly that.

Finally, tax credits change. If a clip says "explore rebates," keep it at that and send people to the Energy.gov page or your utility rather than naming an amount.

Before you publish

Sume tools read media from your workspace, so import the recording first with POST /v1/media-imports and use the returned media.sume.com URL as the trim source. A trim needs start plus exactly one of end or duration, and precision defaults to exact, which lands on the frame you wrote down.

Captions with cues take your text with start and end seconds and skip speech-to-text, so a clip with no speech never hits caption_no_speech. A caption job covers a video up to 60 seconds, which is why each clip here stays well under that.

Write each card as one short sentence and date it, then re-check the source page before each season, since deadlines, rules and figures change. If you need the same words on a second clip or a different layout, pass source_caption_id to restyle an earlier caption job rather than paying for another speech-to-text pass; for authored cues, a second job at $0.20 is the simple route.