What this policy covers
This policy applies to the digital climate guides sold by Oregon Timber Dwellings LLC through the Tokyo Microclimate Observatory: the zone residential briefings, the seasonal travel timing guides, and any bundled editions. These are digital publications priced between $22 and $44, delivered by download. Because they're digital, the usual physical-goods logic doesn't apply, so we wrote the policy around what actually matters: whether the guide was worth your money.
The 30+ day full refund
If you're not satisfied with a guide for any reason, email [email protected] within 30 days of purchase and we'll refund the full purchase price. We honor requests received within a reasonable grace period beyond 30 days as well — if day 33 is when you got around to reading it and it's not what you needed, write to us. The guarantee is a floor, not a trapdoor. Refunds go back to the original payment method, and we process them within 5 business days; your bank may take a few additional days to post the credit.
What we'll ask, and what we won't
We'll ask one question: what fell short? The answer helps us fix the guide — a wrong figure goes to the corrections queue, a missing topic goes on the writing list. But the refund doesn't depend on your answer. “It wasn't what I expected” is a complete and honored reason. We will not interrogate you, offer partial credits instead of the refund you asked for, or route you through a retention script. We're weather observers. Retention theater is not in our skill set and we'd like to keep it that way.
When refunds are automatic
Three situations trigger an automatic refund without you needing to ask. First: a technical failure on our side that prevents delivery of your download for more than 48 hours. Second: a duplicate charge, which we refund as soon as it's identified, whether or not you noticed it. Third: a material error in a guide discovered within your first 30 days — if we correct a figure you relied on, we'll email you the corrected edition and offer a refund alongside it. Keeping your money for a figure we got wrong would violate the entire ethic of the project.
What's not covered
The free site content carries no purchase and needs no refund. Third-party costs you incur around a purchase — bank currency conversion fees, your own data charges — are outside our control and outside the refund. And abuse has a limit: we reserve the right to decline refunds to patterns of purchase-and-refund cycling across multiple guides that clearly isn't dissatisfaction. In practice this has never come up; guide buyers are a sincere lot.
Chargebacks
Please email us before filing a chargeback. We respond within one business day and resolve refund requests faster than card networks do. A chargeback filed after we've already refunded you creates double-credit work for everyone and delays your own money. That said, your card network rights remain yours; this is a request for efficiency, not a waiver of your protections.
How to request a refund
Email [email protected] with the subject line “Refund” and include the email address you used at purchase. That's the entire procedure. If you have the order number, include it; if you don't, we'll find the order. You can also call +1 (206) 624-8910 during US Pacific business hours, or write to the Seattle office at 1201 3rd Avenue, Suite 2800, Seattle, WA 98101. From Japan, the Shibuya office at +81 (3) 5489-3321 can take the request and route it to Seattle the same day.
After the refund
A refunded guide's license lapses, and we ask that you delete the file. We don't audit this. The whole policy runs on the same assumption as the rest of the site: that people who read 3,000-word essays about frost pockets are operating in good faith. Fifteen years of watching thermometers has not made us cynical about our readers, and a refund policy is a poor place to start.
Refund timing in practice
Our side of a refund takes five business days at most, and usually one. The variable part is the banking side: card refunds post within three to ten days depending on the issuer, and international cards can take slightly longer. If fourteen days pass without the credit appearing, write to us and we'll trace the transaction with the processor and send you the reference number. A refund that leaves our hands is trackable all the way back to your statement.
Guides updated after purchase
Climate normals get revised, typhoon seasons add chapters, and our guides are updated when the underlying record changes. Buyers receive updated editions of guides they purchased, free, for as long as the guide remains in the catalog. An update is not grounds for a refund by itself — the corrections process keeps figures honest — but a material error discovered within your first 30 days triggers the automatic refund offer described above. We'd rather return $34 than have a wrong frost-day count sitting on someone's shelf.
Refunds and the corrections ethic
The refund policy and the corrections page are the same commitment wearing two hats. The corrections page keeps the public record honest; the refund policy keeps the commercial record honest. When a correction affects a guide, three things happen in sequence: the corrected edition goes to all buyers, the correction is logged with its date, and recent buyers get the refund offer. We regard a guide with an unacknowledged error as a debt, and this page is how the debt gets paid.
Policy scope and precedence
This policy covers purchases made through this website. It supplements your statutory rights; nothing in it reduces protections you hold under Washington State law or, for Japan-side customers, applicable Japanese consumer law. Where this policy is more generous than statute — the 30+ day full refund on a digital good being the obvious case — the policy controls in your favor. Where statute is more generous, statute controls. Conflicts are resolved toward the customer; that's the simplest rule we could write, so we wrote it.
Contact summary
Refunds: [email protected], subject “Refund,” with your purchase email. Phone: +1 (206) 624-8910 (US Pacific hours) or +81 (3) 5489-3321 (Japan hours, routed to Seattle). Post: Oregon Timber Dwellings LLC, 1201 3rd Avenue, Suite 2800, Seattle, WA 98101, USA. One email, one refund, no theater.
Partial-use cases
A few recurring situations and how we handle them. Bought the wrong zone's guide? Write to us — we'll exchange it for the right one or refund, your choice, within the window. Bought the combined edition after already buying a single-zone guide? We'll credit the earlier purchase against the bundle retroactively within 60 days; buying twice should never cost more than buying once. Download link lost to a crashed laptop? Delivery is re-issued free at any time, no window — access to a purchased file is permanent, even when the refund window has closed.
Why the policy is this generous
Because the product is trust. A climate guide is a promise that the numbers inside it were taken honestly, and a refund policy is where that promise gets tested in commercial form. A narrow, defensive policy would tell you something about how we regard our own figures. The 30+ day full refund tells you the opposite: we expect the guides to survive scrutiny, and we're willing to price that expectation. The project's whole ethic — measured or nothing — would be theater if it stopped at the checkout page.
A note on digital-goods refunds generally
Digital purchases are often sold under “all sales final” logic, on the theory that a downloaded file can't be returned. We think that theory confuses a physical metaphor with a commercial reality. What you buy from us isn't the file — it's the confidence that the figures inside it were worth paying for. If they weren't, the file's undeletability is beside the point. Hence a refund policy for digital goods that behaves like the one a good bookshop would offer: take it home, read it, and if it isn't what we said it was, bring the receipt. The receipt, in our case, is your purchase email, and the bookshop hours are whenever you write to us.