About The Trades Almanac
The Trades Almanac is a reference for the systems in a house: plumbing, heating and cooling, electrical and carpentry, with more sections planned. It is written for the homeowner and the handy person who wants to understand what is behind the wall before deciding whether to fix it or call someone.
It has two halves. The How it works library explains one mechanism per page, with an original diagram, the parts named, the ways it fails, and a plain line about which repairs are yours and which belong to a licensed trade. The Home Almanac is a month-by-month maintenance calendar, with notes for five US climate regions, that tells you what to do this month and links each task back to the explainer that tells you why.
Who publishes it
The Trades Almanac is published by the team behind FourHome, a brand of replacement plumbing repair parts (cartridges, stems, seats and repair kits) sold on Amazon. We built this site because the questions our customers ask are rarely about the part; they are about the faucet, the valve, the furnace and the house around it.
That relationship is disclosed on every page where it matters: in the footer, here, and in a line beside every product box. The way the site earns money is laid out on How we make money.
How the site is written
Every fact, number and range on this site comes from a source we read, and each page lists its references at the bottom. We lean on government agencies (the Department of Energy, the EPA, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the U.S. Fire Administration), university extension services, standards and code bodies, and manufacturers’ own installation and service documents. Where sources disagree, the page says so. Where we could not confirm something, it is not on the site.
The diagrams are original drawings made for this site. The photographs are generated illustrations, made to a brief, and are never presented as a real job, customer or employee. No one quoted on this site is invented, because no one is quoted at all; the references are the sources.
Brand names (Moen, Delta, Kohler, Pfister, Carrier and the rest) appear only to identify which part fits which fixture or to explain how a product works. The Trades Almanac is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any of them.
What it will not do
The site stays at homeowner-safe steps. Anything involving gas, the inside of an electrical panel, refrigerant, water heater relief valves, structural walls or a roof says so, and says to call a licensed professional. A separate review of every safety instruction was part of the build, and we would rather leave a step out than guess.
It is also not a troubleshooter, a how-to video channel, a design magazine or a contractor directory. Those are other sites’ jobs, and where one of them serves you better, the page links to it.
Contact
The site has no comments and no support line. If a page is wrong, the fastest fix is to email the publisher at the address in the footer with the page address and the source that contradicts it.