How We Research
Where our facts come from, and how we keep them fresh.
Source hierarchy
Technical claims resolve upward through this priority, highest first:
- Manufacturer manuals and service documentation for the equipment discussed
- Official government and standards sources
- U.S. DOE, Energy.gov, EPA, and equivalent official bodies
- Industry bodies where appropriate, such as AHRI or ASHRAE
- Utility and regulatory documentation
- Reputable technical publications with named authors and editorial process
- Strong secondary sources with citations
Community forums and Q&A threads are useful signals for how real owners describe symptoms, but never the sole source for a technical fact. A forum anecdote never overrides the sources above.
Fact-checking
Non-obvious factual claims are checked against the source list before publishing, with access dates and model or edition numbers recorded where a claim is model-specific. AI-assisted drafts go through the same human verification — AI output is never trusted on its own.
Freshness reviews
Published guides are re-reviewed on a fixed cadence — high-safety topics at least annually, everything else at least every 18 months — plus event-driven reviews for new queries, traffic changes, broken outbound links, superseded manuals, and reader corrections. An article's updated date changes only when its substance changed, never for cosmetic edits.
Mistakes
When we get something wrong, we fix it openly under ourcorrections policy.