Ranking independence
Rankings are computed from published manufacturer specifications against the criteria printed on each page. Commission is not an input, and it could not be a useful one: the commission rate is the same across everything we link to, so there is nothing to bias toward.
No manufacturer has paid to appear here, and none can. No product has been supplied to us free of charge, because none has been supplied at all. We have never been contacted by a brand about placement and if we are, the answer is no and the request will be noted on the relevant page.
No number without a source
Every numeric claim on this site traces to one of three things, and it is always labeled with which:
- A published manufacturer specification, cited with the listing it came from.
- A published convention or standard, stated as a convention rather than a fact we measured.
- Our own arithmetic, printed step by step on the page.
Where a manufacturer does not publish something, the page says “Not published by the manufacturer” in those words. We never interpolate from a similar product, carry a figure across models, or estimate.
How a “skip this” pick is chosen
Every ranked page carries at least one, and it is not chosen to make the others look better. A pick is marked skip when one of the following is true:
- It fails at the job the category exists for. A gutter-only clip on a roofline that changes surface; a 20-foot 16-gauge cord for a whole-house display.
- It publishes nothing you could plan around. A projector with no resolution, no brightness and no throw distance is a photograph, not a product specification.
- It is materially worse on the category’s own key metric at the same size and price. An 88-tip wreath beside a 160-tip wreath at the same diameter.
- It carries a hidden cost the listing does not surface. An incandescent string that quietly caps a 15 amp circuit at 36 strings.
A skip pick is never a bad product by definition. Several are competently made and correctly described — they are simply the wrong purchase for the reader the page is written for, and the page says why.
When a page is updated
- Prices: refreshed by the price layer. A price older than 48 hours is not displayed at all.
- Product rankings: reviewed quarterly, and always in August before the season, for new models and discontinued lines.
- Ledger guides: reviewed annually. The physics does not move but products and energy rates do, and the stated kilowatt-hour assumption is re-checked each year.
- Trust pages: reviewed annually, or immediately on any change to how the site earns.
A page displays a “last checked” date driven by its own content date. That date does not move when the price layer runs, because the price refreshing is not the content changing. A site where every page claimed to have changed every day would be telling you nothing.
The year in a title
A year is only added to or bumped in a title when the content behind it has genuinely been re-reviewed. Bumping a year on stale content is a small lie that costs a reader real time, and it is the most common dishonesty in seasonal publishing.
Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, we would rather hear it than leave it up. Email info@wreathandwatt.com or use the contact form, and if you can, name the page and the figure.
What happens then:
- We check the claim against the manufacturer’s published specification.
- If it is wrong, the page is corrected and its last-checked date updated.
- If the correction changed a recommendation, a one-line note is added to the page saying what changed and why.
Silent edits are not acceptable here. The only asset this site has is that its numbers can be checked, and quietly changing one destroys that for every other number on the site.
What we will not publish
- Fabricated reviews, testimonials, ratings or review counts. Under any circumstances.
- A claim of having tested, owned or used a product we have not.
- A credential, license or qualification we do not hold.
- A price we cannot source live, including “about” and “around” figures in prose.
- A specification we could not find, presented as one we did.
- Review or AggregateRating structured data. Our scores are an editorial weighting of published specs, not ratings from first-hand use, and marking them up as reviews would misrepresent that to search engines.
The full method, including the scoring rubric and the safety boundary on our electrical arithmetic, is on how we research.