Our method in five steps
- Start from what the product has to do in a storm, flood or outage, and write that down before looking at any model.
- Compare manufacturer specs and manuals side by side, not marketing claims.
- Check safety: certification marks, CO shut-off on generators, recalls on the CPSC and Health Canada lists.
- Check prices at several retailers in Canada and the US, and show the date we checked.
- Revisit the list when prices move, a model is replaced or a recall is announced.
What we compare
Each category has a fixed set of lead specs, chosen for what changes the result at home: for example, the running watts, CO shut-off and fuel of a generator, or the flow at 10 feet and battery runtime of a backup sump pump. Every product in the category is compared on the same specs, in the same order.
Our score is editorial, out of 10, and based on that research. It is never shown as stars, because stars read as customer reviews.
Safety comes first
Generators, heaters, heat cable and flooded basements can kill. Where a page touches them, we follow and link the official guidance (national bodies such as Health Canada, the Government of Canada, the US CPSC and EPA, and a provincial, state or city page where a local rule applies) and never contradict it. When a model is recalled, it comes off our lists; when a sibling model is recalled, we name the recall on the product page of the model we recommend.
Canada and the US
We list a product for a country only when we found it sold there under the same model number. Products we couldn’t find in Canada are marked US only, and Canadian certification marks (such as CSA on a CO alarm) are only claimed when we have seen them stated.
What owners say
Where we summarise what owners say, we read a modest sample of owner reviews and forum posts by hand, note the themes in our own words and say how many we read and where. Those counts are our sample, never a retailer’s total, and a summary appears only after a person has checked it.
How we read sources
When we read a web page, we identify ourselves honestly, respect each site’s robots.txt and stop when a site refuses us. We never copy text from retailers, makers or reviewers: every page is in our own words.
What we don’t do
- We don’t lab-test products or claim hands-on testing that didn’t happen.
- We don’t accept payment to include, rank or remove a product.
- We don’t show a price as current once it is out of date: every price says when it was checked.
How often we update
Every price shows the date it was checked, and we recheck prices by hand until retailers send us price feeds. Guides and picks are reviewed every six months, or sooner when a model is replaced or recalled. The “Updated” date on a page changes only when its content or prices changed.
How we use AI
We use AI tools to help research and draft pages and to sort our notes on owner reviews. Specs come from manufacturers, safety advice from official sources and prices from retailers, and a person checks pages before they go live.