Heating your home is about to get a bit more expensive.

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. warned Tuesday that its residential customers will pay about 5 percent more for natural gas this month than they did last December, the result of higher wholesale costs. The average residential bill should be $80.18, according to the utility’s forecast.

As dismal as that sounds, it could have been worse.

San Francisco’s PG&E has seen its costs for buying gas in bulk jump 14.5 percent in 2007. But the utility’s 4.2 million gas customers probably won’t use as much fuel this month as they did last December. The mild and dry autumn should rein in bills.

“It has been warmer,” said PG&E spokesman David Eisenhauer. “But conservation this winter is critical.”

The utility has a program designed to encourage energy efficiency that gives customers an extra financial incentive to cut the amount of gas they burn in winter. Those who use 10 percent less this winter than they did in the same months last year will get a 20 percent credit on their bills.

“Any opportunity you have for efficiency will not only lower your bill, it’s the right thing to do,” Eisenhauer said.

Under California regulations, utilities such as PG&E aren’t allowed to profit from increased natural gas prices. But they are allowed to pass those higher prices through to customers.

Wholesale prices for natural gas haven’t set any records this year, the way oil prices have. But they have been higher than they were in 2006, in part because the bull market in crude has pulled up prices for other fuels. Natural gas futures - contracts to buy gas in a specific month in the future - have averaged nearly 12 percent higher in the last six months than during the same period last year on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

In addition, the cost of transporting gas via pipeline, from suppliers as far away as Canada, has increased this year, Eisenhauer said.

Most home furnaces in California run on natural gas, so bills typically jump in November and December before peaking in January. November’s average residential gas bill from PG&E was $42.53.

So what comes next?

Gas futures recently have started falling in price, largely because the country appears to have ample supplies of the fuel. That won’t immediately lower your bill, however, because PG&E buys much of its winter supply of gas in advance and stores it. The company’s last long-range forecast, issued last month, predicted that home heating bills would average $104.47 in January before falling back to $88.56 in February. The utility is expected to update that forecast sometime this week.

Credit for cuts

Pacific Gas and Electric Co. offers customers credit on their natural gas bills if they cut the amount they use during winter. For example, those who use 5 percent less gas in January and February compared with the same months last winter will get a 5 percent credit. Those who save 10 percent get a 20 percent credit, which will appear on their March or April bills. For more information go to: links.sfgate.com/ZBSC

E-mail David R. Baker at dbaker@sfchronicle.com.

A San Francisco company is offering a new service that allows consumers to shrink-wrap their DNA. Just add water and presto: genetic material ready for testing.

DNA Direct, which provides consumer genetic testing for a variety of serious conditions, premiered a new method Tuesday for storing personal DNA called DNA Archive, which allows individuals to keep preserved DNA at room temperature.

“The extracted DNA is sent back to you, and you can put it anywhere you want,” said Trish Brown, vice president of clinical affairs for DNA Direct. “If you want to put it in your sock drawer, you can. If you want to put it in a safe deposit box, you can do that as well.”

The company worked with Biomatrica, a San Diego company that develops ways to stabilize biological samples without having to freeze and maintain them in cold-storage facilities.

Using the new technology, DNA material collected through a cheek swab is sent to a laboratory where it is purified, air-dried and stabilized using a synthetic substance that essentially shrink-wraps the DNA.

Consumers receive a small UV-resistant box with three miniature test tubes containing their dried DNA. The material can later be reconstituted with a few drops of water. The service costs $175.

A growing number of companies are offering direct-to-consumer genetic testing, from companies like DNA Direct, Navigenics of Redwood City and Google Inc.-backed 23andMe, named for the 23 pairs of chromosomes in the human body. With that growth comes numerous business opportunities, like DNA Direct’s archiving service.

“Increasingly, genetic testing is being turned into a fetish, and there’s no shortage of companies quick to capitalize on that,” said Jesse Reynolds, policy analyst with the Center for Genetics and Society, an Oakland nonprofit advocacy organization.

Reynolds described the usefulness of such a service as limited, but said it would be most helpful to store DNA of people who have passed away because genetic testing can be done at any time on living individuals.

While results from the dearly departed could be interesting and informative, especially as it relates to family heritage or medical history, Reynolds said, that use raises consent issues and other ethical concerns.

“Somebody’s father dies and you always wondered, ‘Was he really my father? I never really looked like him,’ ” he said.

That scenario is hardly far-fetched.

Biomatrica’s chief executive officer, Judy Muller-Cohn, said she received a call from a woman on Friday - the day she finalized the agreement with DNA Direct.

The woman’s male relative had just died, but the family was keeping the body in the morgue hoping to find a way to collect his DNA - for a paternity suit.

“They wanted to bury him, but wanted to wait until they got a sample,” Muller-Cohn said. “So here I was Friday morning, giving my condolences to this woman, while at the same time making the arrangements to get his DNA.”

The partnership with DNA Direct is the first time Muller-Cohn’s 3-year-old company has been involved in a service geared toward consumers, she said. Biomatrica’s products typically are used by public and private research and academic institutions, the military and crime labs.

Muller-Cohn, a research scientist, said she formed the company to develop what she considers to be a superior way to store samples over the conventional freezing method. “I personally had a freezer breakdown and lost a lot of very, very valuable samples and knew there had to be a better way,” she said.

Brown, of DNA Direct, said the shrink-wrap technology is also cheaper than freezing and more reliable than another method, which involves storing blood spots on filter paper.

Freezing costs about $300, plus as much as $100 a year for continued storage, and the paper method tends to degrade over time, Brown said. The shrink-wrap method has survived extreme temperatures and artificial aging up to 20 years.

As for potential uses, Brown said people may want to store their DNA for future genetic testing. In addition, they may also want to keep samples of their children’s DNA in case of death or kidnapping.

DNA Direct consulted numerous laboratories to ensure they could use material stored with the new technique, she said. The technique is also compatible with current genetic tests, but Brown couldn’t vouch for what the future will hold.

“I can’t imagine a test that would not be able to use raw DNA that has been stabilized, but you never know,” she said. How it works

– Order a sample collection kit from DNA Direct ( «www.dnadirect.com»).

– Using the kit, take a cheek swab sample; send it to the laboratory in a provided postage-paid envelope.

– The sample is dried using a synthetic material that “shrink -wraps” the DNA to preserve it for future use.

– Customers receive three small test-tube vials containing the samples.

– Store the samples at home or other location, like a bank deposit box.

– When you want to use a sample, it can be reconstituted by genetic testers by adding a few drops of water.

– Price: $175.

Source: DNA Direct

E-mail Victoria Colliver at vcolliver@sfchronicle.com.

Q: I have a growing business in tree care and urban forest consulting and am considering outsourcing our call management. I have found that it is important for potential customers to reach a live person even if they are leaving a message. Are there dependable companies that market to small businesses? We take 25 to 40 calls a week from people inquiring about treating their diseased trees.

East Bay arborist

A: At one end of the spectrum there are call centers - those folks who answer the phone when we are ordering stuff from a catalog or complaining about how our computer is on the fritz. But most call centers are geared to large businesses that receive thousands of calls each week, not to small outfits like yours that field a few dozen calls.

At the other end of the spectrum is the old-fashioned answering service - the kind used by many doctors’ offices for night and weekend calls - where someone takes a message and then passes it on to the business owner.

Then in the middle there’s a growing category of souped-up answering services and virtual assistants who provide more than basic message-taking.

Reliable Receptionist in Walnut Creek is one example of a souped-up answering service. It has the ability to connect calls to your cell phone when you’re out in the field, and to schedule appointments for you in a Web-based program that you can view and edit from any computer.

Owner Victor Mataraso encourages clients to come in and meet his staff, and to provide background information so that his receptionists can answer basic questions.

“Our clients can say, ‘Here are the top 10 issues that come up in phone inquiries, and here are the things we’d like you to do,’ ” Mataraso said.

Virtual assistants are independent entrepreneurs who provide a range of administrative or creative services from their own office. It’s like having a Gal or Guy Friday on a contract basis. A virtual assistant might be editing a report for one client and organizing a conference for another, while answering phone calls for your tree-care business.

“They can help you filter calls, can be trained in answering some questions, and can help you market your business by making outgoing calls,” said Nina Feldman, who runs an Oakland firm called Nina Feldman Connections that provides free referrals to office and computer support businesses. “Hiring a full-time phone receptionist can cost $30,000 a year. Virtual assistants can usually give you a stable month-to-month retainer of a few hundred dollars, with no hidden fees.”

How to find a reliable answering service or virtual assistant? The best approach is the same way you’d find any other service - through personal referrals. Ask other business owners to recommend someone. Check references.

Ask how many hours a day these firms offer live receptionists; some shift over to voice mail at night. Ask what services they provide and how they forward your messages. E-mail? Text message? Pager? Fax? Find out how long they’ve been in business, and how much staff turnover they have.

And call up some of the clients of these firms - at a time when the firm is answering their calls - to see whether you like the way they’d be greeting your potential customers.

Want more info? The Association of TeleServices International offers tips for choosing an answering service at links.sfgate.com/ZBRX.

Q: We run a marketing agency that wants to grow by adding people, but not expanding our bricks-and-mortar facilities. If we hire full-time and part-time telecommuters in California and in other states, do we need to purchase workers’ comp insurance? How about other types of liability insurance?

Eager to expand in S.F.

A: You need workers’ comp coverage for all employees - no matter whether they are working 40 hours a week in your main office, 20 hours a week in their own homes, or one hour a week at the corner Starbucks.

You would not need workers’ comp coverage if these folks were independent contractors. But keep in mind that the Internal Revenue Service and state tax officials have very strict rules for what constitutes an independent contractor.

You can’t simply declare someone a contractor as a way to get out of paying workers’ comp or employment taxes. (For a summary of California and federal rules about employee-versus-contractor, see links.sfgate.com/ZBRY.)

As for liability insurance with telecommuters, Bruce Callander of Sweet & Baker Insurance Brokers in San Francisco offers the following tips:

– Make sure your general liability policy doesn’t include a “designated premises endorsement” that would limit coverage to your main place of business.

– Add a rider to your general liability policy that would provide coverage for vehicles owned by your employees. This is called “non-owned and hired auto coverage.”

“Say you’ve got Mr. Work-out-of-his-home, and he’s running to an appointment in his own car and hits someone on company time,” Callander said. “His personal auto policy is in the first position (for covering liability), but if he is uninsured or under-insured, the plaintiff’s lawyer will say, ‘This happened on company time, therefore there’s liability against the business.’ ”

– Consider adding coverage for employment practices liability, if your business is adding significant numbers of staff. This would cover legal fees and damages stemming from lawsuits over wrongful termination, job discrimination and sexual harassment.

“The larger a company becomes, the more valuable this is,” Callander said. “That’s because as a company grows, you have a series of sub-managers and can start to lose control” over how employees are being managed.

Free legal clinic: Got legal questions about your small business? The Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center and Legal Services for Entrepreneurs are offering a free legal clinic on Dec. 12 in San Francisco. To register for an appointment of 30 or 60 minutes, call (415) 348-6248. You can get help from a lawyer on issues such as contracts, employment law, copyright and trademark, real estate, financing, and what kind of business entity to form.

And more free stuff: Intuit, the maker of QuickBooks, has two new freebies for small businesses. JumpUp.com is a site that offers how-to articles on various aspects of running a small business, along with forums where business owners can share tips and advice.

And for folks on the verge of starting a one-person business, Intuit offers a free program called QuickBooks SimpleStart to track sales and expenses, create invoices etc. Of course if your business succeeds and grows, you’ll need to shell out money for a full-blown accounting program, but SimpleStart could be useful while you test the waters. See links.sfgate.com/ZBRZ.

Send your small-business questions to Ilana DeBare at mindyourbiz@sfchronicle.com, or to Mind Your Business, San Francisco Chronicle, 901 Mission St., San Francisco, CA 94103.