Affiliate disclosure
How Home Water Compass is paid, in plain language — and what that money can and cannot influence.
The two ways we earn money
- Professional requests. When you explicitly ask a named local provider to contact you, that provider pays us for the qualified request. You always see the company's name before you type a single contact detail, and your request goes to that one company only — never to a list of dealers.
- Product and test links. If you buy a treatment product or a test kit through a link on this site, we may earn a commission from the merchant. The price you pay is the same either way.
Where you'll see the disclosure
Next to the button, every time. Any link or request that can result in compensation carries a visible disclosure adjacent to it — on provider match pages, on the contact form, on product cards and on test cards. We don't bury it here and consider the job done; this page just explains the system behind those labels.
What compensation cannot change
- The route you're given. Whether your situation calls for learning, testing, a product or a professional is decided by versioned rules that look at your water source, your evidence and your home — not at what pays. Official health guidance always outranks any commercial suggestion, and when the evidence isn't there, the answer is a test, not a purchase.
- The evidence bar. A product only appears when its exact, model-level certified claim matches your concern. No verified claim, no recommendation — even if a commission is available.
- The order of options. When we show up to three products, they're organized by fit: best overall fit, lower upfront cost, lower five-year cost. Commission rates play no part in that ordering.
- The honest no. If no provider covers your area, if a provider is closed or at capacity, or if no product with a verified claim exists, we say so — we don't substitute a paid alternative.
What "qualified request" means
Providers pay only for requests that meet the criteria they agreed to — inside their service area, within their service categories, within their capacity. Requests from areas without coverage are never collected in the first place: we check availability before asking for any personal detail, so there's no incentive to gather contacts we can't honestly route.
Relationships we do not have
- We do not accept payment for editorial content, reviews or rankings.
- We do not sell advertising space on report or quiz pages.
- We do not sell or rent your personal information — see the privacy policy.
- No manufacturer, retailer or professional can pay to alter the decision rules described in our methodology.
If something looks off
If you ever find a commercial link without a disclosure beside it, or a recommendation you believe was shaped by payment rather than fit, tell us at contact — we treat that as a defect and fix it. The standards providers agree to are published in our partner standards.