Editorial policy

Sourcing standards

Every factual claim on this site must trace to one of four things:

1. A manufacturer’s published specification — a product page, a spec sheet or a manual, linked.
2. A published standard or public dataset — CDC water chemistry guidance, EIA electricity rates, EPA water cost figures, ENERGY STAR publications.
3. Our own arithmetic, with the inputs, formula and sources shown on the page.
4. An explicit statement that we could not verify it.

There is no fifth category. If a figure cannot be placed in one of the four, it does not go on the page.

The no-fabrication rule

Stated publicly because it should be checkable. We do not:

• Invent or estimate a specification. Where a manufacturer publishes nothing, the page says “not published” and explains what that costs the reader.
• Invent prices. Prices render from a live data layer only; no price is typed into an article.
• Invent reviews, testimonials, ratings or review counts. This site carries none, because it has no customers and no reviews to report. A page with no testimonials beats a page with fabricated ones.
• Claim to have tested anything. No test pool, no samples, no “in our testing”, ever.
• Claim credentials we do not hold. No certifications, no tenure claims, no expert panel.

What our scores are, and are not

Products carry numeric scores across four to six metrics. Those are our reading of published specifications. They are not test results, not customer ratings, and not aggregated from any external source.

Consequently no score on this site appears in structured data. We publish Product and Offer markup where a live price exists; we do not publish Review, review-rating or aggregate-rating markup anywhere. Marking an editorial opinion up as a review rating would contradict everything on this page, and it is a line we will not cross for a rich result.

Independence from commercial relationships

This site earns affiliate commission, disclosed in full on the disclosure page and above the first link on every monetized page. Three commitments follow from that:

Ranking order is set by the method, not the payout. If the cheaper product is the better answer it ranks higher, and it earns us less.

Every roundup names at least one thing to skip, and every pick states who it is wrong for. That is deliberately costly and it is the practical test of our independence.

We publish pages that argue against buying. Where the honest conclusion is that a reader should spend less, or nothing, we write that.

Review and update cadence

• Roundups: quarterly, and whenever a product is discontinued.
• Cost guides: annually, and whenever national rates shift materially. The whole page is arithmetic over those rates, so a stale rate makes it wrong rather than merely dated.
• Chemistry and problem guides: annually, checking that cited ranges remain current.
• Seasonal how-to guides: annually, ahead of the relevant season.
• Trust pages: on any change, reviewed annually. The disclosure page must always reflect actual program participation.

Every refresh updates the visible last-updated date on the page and the sitemap entry, taken from the real content date rather than the build timestamp.

Corrections

We publish arithmetic specifically so that it can be checked, which means we will sometimes be shown to be wrong. When that happens:

1. We verify the report against the underlying source.
2. We correct the page.
3. We update the last-updated date so the change is visible rather than silent.
4. Where a correction materially changes a recommendation or a headline figure, we note the change on the page rather than quietly editing it.

Report an error to info@splashandskimmer.com. A specific correction — the page, the figure and what it should be — gets fixed fastest.

Who writes this

Every article carries a byline linking to the author’s biography, and the same person is named in the page’s structured data. A visible byline that disagreed with the machine-readable one would be a form of misrepresentation, so we keep them identical.

AI and automation

We use software tooling in producing and maintaining this site — price data, publishing infrastructure and drafting support. Editorial judgment, source selection, the arithmetic and every recommendation are ours, and every claim on the site is subject to the sourcing standards above regardless of how the sentence containing it was drafted. Nothing here is published without meeting those standards.