How we decide what to recommend, what we've actually touched versus what we've only read about, and how you can tell the difference on any page.

The honest starting point

A lot of "we tested 47 power stations" articles are written by someone who has tested zero. They read spec sheets, rewrote the marketing, added a photo of a product in a field, and published.

We're not going to do that, and we're not going to claim hands-on testing we haven't done. Where an article is based on research rather than a unit we've had in our hands, it says so on the page.

How an article gets made

Start from the problem, not the product. Every article starts with a real buying question — "will this run my well pump" — rather than with a product we want to sell.
Pull specs from primary sources. Capacity, output, surge, chemistry, cycle life and warranty terms come from the manufacturer’s current published documentation, not from a retailer listing and never from a rival blog.
Do the arithmetic ourselves. Runtime figures are calculated from published capacity with a 15% allowance for inverter losses, using typical appliance draw. We show the method so you can check it.
Read the one-star reviews. Marketing tells you what a product does. Warranty claims and one-star reviews tell you what it does in year two.
Name who it is wrong for. Every review must identify at least one product the reader should not buy and say who it is wrong for. If we cannot find a real drawback, we have not researched it enough.
Mark what we have not verified. Any claim we have not personally confirmed carries a visible marker until it is checked. We would rather look unfinished than look confident and be wrong.

What we mark on the page

You will see two markers in our articles:

verify — a factual claim we've sourced but not yet independently confirmed against the manufacturer's current documentation.
needs first-hand data — a claim that would require hands-on testing we have not done.

These are unusual to publish. Most sites hide this. We'd rather you knew exactly how solid each sentence is.

Where our numbers come from

Specs — the manufacturer's current spec sheet. All product data lives in one file so a correction fixes every page at once.
Runtimes — calculated, never quoted from marketing. Capacity × 0.85 ÷ average draw. We apply a duty cycle to anything with a compressor, because a fridge motor isn't running all the time.
Appliance draw — typical figures for common US appliances. Your appliance can differ by 40%, which is why we tell you to read the label on the back of it.
Prices — we don't publish them. They change weekly and a stale price is worse than none. Buttons go to the live retailer page.

How we rank things

Rankings come from fitness for a stated purpose, not from commission rate. The cheapest product that solves your problem is the right answer, and we say so even though a cheap product pays us less.

A product does not need to be in a ranking to appear on this site. If the honest answer is "none of these, save your money," that's the answer we publish.

Corrections

We get things wrong. When we do, we fix the article, update the modified date, and note the correction rather than quietly editing.

Spotted an error? hello@greencommuteguide.com. We take reader corrections seriously — you often know your own equipment better than we do.

What money can't buy

No brand can pay for a review, a ranking, or a mention. No brand sees an article before publication. We accept no free products in exchange for coverage terms.

The full financial picture is on our affiliate disclosure page.

Who writes here

Every article carries a named author with a real bio. See about.

Editorial Process