Editorial policy

Source hierarchy

Highest first. A lower tier is used only where no higher one exists, and is named as such.

1. Manufacturer primary. Official product pages, specification sheets and product manuals. This is where a wattage, a coverage claim or a safety feature should come from.
2. Standards and safety bodies. UL, Intertek/ETL, OSHA’s NRTL program, NFPA 70 for electrical requirements.
3. Government data. The U.S. Energy Information Administration for electricity prices; the U.S. Fire Administration for fire statistics.
4. The live retail listing. Published titles, specification bullets, prices and availability, all timestamped.
5. Reputable secondary, only where no primary exists, and labeled as secondary in the text.

Competitor publishers are never cited as fact. Another site’s cost-per-hour figure is that site’s assumption, not data. Our numbers are computed from a rate we source and date ourselves.

Sourcing rules

• Every statistic carries a source name and a publication date, inline.
• Every specification is attributed to the document it came from.
• Every calculation shows its formula and its inputs on the page.
• Every price comes from the live layer and carries the date it was checked.
• If a figure cannot be sourced, the sentence does not run. Not a hedge, not “reportedly”, not “around” — cut.

That last rule has visible consequences on this site, deliberately. Our fire statistics page ends with a section naming the figures we left out and why — including two charts in a federal report whose values we could not confidently match to their axis labels, and a widely circulated set of percentages we could not read at the primary source. A page that says what it does not know is more useful than one that guesses.

What we will not publish

• Any testing claim. We do not test heaters. No “we tested”, “lab-tested”, “hands-on”, “in our testing”, or “we tried”.
• Any credential we do not hold. No expert panel, no certified technician, no “reviewed by our engineers”.
• Any tenure claim. Scooter M. is an enthusiast. Not “long-time”, not “veteran”, not “X years”.
• A score out of ten, which would imply an evaluation we did not perform.
• A price, star rating or review count written into a page. Those come from the live layer or they do not appear.
• Testimonials or customer quotes. This is a new publisher with no reviews. A clean page beats a fabricated one, permanently.
• Review or aggregateRating structured data for a product. We have not rated these units, so marking one up as though we had would be structured-data fabrication.

Corrections

We will get things wrong. A manufacturer revises a specification, a listing changes, or we make an arithmetic error. When that happens:

• Report it to info@glowandgauge.com or through the contact form. A specific correction with a source gets acted on fastest.
• Factual errors are corrected promptly — a wrong number is fixed as soon as we can verify the right one.
• Corrections are visible and dated, not silent. The “last reviewed” date on a page moves when its content does, so you can see that it was touched.
• A safety error is treated as urgent. If a page on this site tells you something unsafe, we would rather take it down while we check than leave it up while we deliberate.

This matters more than it sounds. Several publishers ranking for these terms carry cost figures computed from electricity rates that are years out of date, silently. A visible, dated corrections process is a small thing that a large publisher can find hard to do and a small one can do easily.

Update cadence

• Prices: refreshed daily from the live data layer. Anything older than 48 hours stops displaying.
• The electricity rate: reviewed quarterly against the EIA’s Electric Power Monthly. Changing it recomputes every cost table on the site at once, because the rate lives in one module.
• Roundup picks: reviewed quarterly for availability and new models, plus a pre-season pass each September.
• Safety statistics: re-verified annually, on publication of new federal data.
• Product specifications: re-checked when a manufacturer revises them.

Independence

• No sponsored posts. No paid placements. No paid rankings.
• No free products accepted from manufacturers or retailers.
• Picks are selected before affiliate links are attached, and commission rate plays no part in ordering.
• Every roundup names something to skip — the clearest available evidence that the page is not simply a list of things to buy.

How the site is funded, in full: the affiliate disclosure. How every figure is derived: the methodology.

Authorship

Every page on this site is written by Scooter M. and carries that byline. There is no ghostwritten “editorial team” standing in for staff that does not exist. Who that is, and what he does not claim.

Scope

This site covers electric space heaters for the U.S. market, and nothing else. No fireplaces, no whole-home HVAC, no water heaters, no humidifiers, no unvented combustion appliances. Cost figures are in U.S. cents per kilowatt-hour and certification references are to UL 1278, UL 2021 and ETL, because a cost table is only trustworthy against the right electricity market and a certification page only correct against the right standards body.