Editorial policy
How our educational content is written, reviewed and kept current — and the lines it never crosses.
Principles
- Calm, not alarming. Symptoms are treated as clues, never as proof. We write "one possible cause" where marketing copy would write "warning sign." Fear sells water treatment; it does not help you choose it.
- Primary sources or nothing. Every factual claim about water systems, contaminants or treatment traces to a primary source — a utility's own report, an EPA record, a state drinking-water program publication or a certification body's listing. If we can't source it, we don't publish it.
- Uncertainty is stated, not smoothed over. Where the honest answer is "this cannot be known without a laboratory test," the page says exactly that, in a visible callout — not in a footnote.
- Plain language. Grains per gallon get explained. Acronyms get expanded. A reader who has never thought about water hardness should be able to follow every guide from the first paragraph.
How content is produced
Guides start from the decisions readers actually face — "is this smell a problem?", "do I need a softener?" — not from keywords. Each guide separates three things explicitly: what the symptom suggests, what evidence would confirm or rule causes out, and what the next step costs. Claims are checked against the primary source at writing time, and the source is linked in place.
Review cadence
- Water-system data points carry their reporting period and retrieval date, and are re-checked when utilities publish new annual reports — see data sources for the full pipeline.
- An automated weekly job checks that our source links still resolve; broken or moved sources are flagged for human review.
- Educational guides are reviewed on a schedule, and material corrections update the visible review date.
The wall between editorial and commercial
- Commercial partners have no influence on educational content — no paid placements, no sponsored guides, no review scores for sale.
- Educational pages recommend categories and evidence, not brands. Brand-level suggestions appear only in the products section, where every item must carry a verified, model-level certified claim and a visible disclosure.
- Nobody who negotiates commercial partnerships can overrule an editorial decision about what a guide says.
What we deliberately do not publish
- Safety scores. Collapsing utility reports, symptoms and lab data into one number misleads more than it informs.
- Diagnoses from symptoms. A rotten-egg smell has several possible causes; declaring one without evidence is guessing with authority.
- Health advice. We describe what official bodies say and link to them. Medical questions belong with medical professionals, and we never ask about health conditions.
- Scare statistics. Area-level violation counts presented as personal risk are a manipulation pattern, not information.
Corrections
When we get something wrong, we fix the page, note the correction, and update the review date. Report an error through the contact page — corrections are a named topic in the form — and include the page or report link so we can trace the exact source. Substantiated corrections are typically resolved within a few business days.