Do You Need A Meter Or A Heat Box?

Hey, my name is Ralph, and I'm with Flexfilm. And I want to talk to you guys about something that's really serious. I mean, if you're a professional window tinter, I mean, you wake up every day, this is how you support your family. This is how you rely on your income. I don't know. I talked to hundreds and hundreds of window tinters, and I don't understand why most of you guys don't have a meter, and also, and/or don't have a heat box. Our industry is unregulated. There's a lot of marketing with manufacturers and distributors. And a lot of this information, the spec information is biased. There's nobody to police the industry, so people can do and say what they want to without any real consequences. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that anybody and everybody out there is lying, but I found most people do lie or stretch the truth. It's epidemic that information is slanted to sell.

So how do you protect yourself? What advice do I have for you guys to stay in control? And that would be to get a meter. I know that a lot of guys are like, "Man, I don't know if I... That meter's $1,000. I can't spend that kind of money." You know what? You can't afford not to. If you're really serious, this is what you do. I don't know how to scrape up that money and tell you to budget, but buying a meter would be the best thing that you could do. It would be a way for you to demonstrate window film to customers, but most importantly, know what you're selling. The meter, a beamsplitter, a broad spectrum beamsplitter is going to be something that'll tell you what's going through the glass. You don't need somebody's spec chart to tell you what's going through the glass. This meter will simply tell you transmission information. And these meters can be accurate enough to let you know where you stand.

EDTM makes a good one. We'll go into that later. I'll list it in the comments below. We also need to use a meter in conjunction with a heat lamp demonstration. The heat lamp demonstration tells you nothing, the meter tells you. The heat lamp demonstration simply tells you how well the film slows down heat, and you can feel it with your hand. You can't get that information from the spec numbers typically, unless you know how to read them and understand them. But remember what I said at first, they're not always accurate. So you can't rely on something that's not accurate. You have to use your own meter. You have to use your own hand. If you understand that principle and you're serious about running a business and you want to know what you're buying and you want to know what you're putting on customers' cars, this is the only reliable way, affordable way to do it. Meter, heat box, that's it.