Editorial policy

How a page gets written

1. We start from a real question people search for, not from a product we want to sell.
2. We gather the primary documents: manufacturer specification sheets, submittal sheets, installation manuals, ENERGY STAR certification records, and the relevant code text.
3. We do the arithmetic — first-hour rating for storage, GPM at a stated temperature rise for tankless — rather than repeating a figure from another article.
4. We read owner reviews on the retailer listings, looking for complaints that repeat rather than individual bad experiences.
5. We write the page, name the source of every figure on the page itself, and state who each product is wrong for.
6. Before publishing, every factual claim is checked against the document it came from.

Sourcing hierarchy

In order of preference:

1. Manufacturer specification sheets and installation manuals — for GPM, UEF, first-hour rating, BTU input, capacities, clearances and warranty terms. Always preferred for product figures.
2. ENERGY STAR program documents — for efficiency and savings claims, cited to the specific document with its date.
3. The Electronic Code of Federal Regulations — for federal minimum efficiency standards and regulatory claims.
4. Model plumbing code and state amendments — for the expansion tank and drain pan requirement pages. We always say which code and which section, and we never write “required by code” nationally when the requirement is conditional.
5. Utility and state energy office program pages — for rebates, cited per state with the date checked.

A note on one specific source. The Department of Energy’s Energy Saver consumer pages, which this whole category cites for sizing and efficiency guidance, now return a 404. Where a widely repeated DOE figure appears on this site, we either re-source it from a live primary document or we name the secondary source that carries it. We do not write “according to the Department of Energy” over a dead link.

The four things we never invent

• A price. No price appears anywhere on this site, in prose, in a table or in structured data. We have no live price feed, so every product link goes to the live retailer listing instead.
• A rating or a review count. We publish no star ratings of our own and no aggregate ratings, and we do not restate a retailer’s product ratings as if they were ours.
• A specification. GPM, UEF, first-hour rating, BTU, kW, gallons, warranty years — each comes from a named document. Where a figure cannot be found, the page says so rather than estimating.
• A testing claim. We do not test units. No “in our testing”, no hours-spent figure, no lab.

When sources disagree

We present the range and name who published each end of it. Installation cost is the clearest case: published ranges for overlapping scopes of work differ by thousands of dollars. Averaging them would produce a confident-looking number that nobody actually published, which is worse than an honest range.

Corrections

A correction is triggered by any factual error: a wrong specification, an outdated warranty term, a superseded code reference, a discontinued model presented as current, or a mis-stated rebate. Email contact@heatandtap.com or use the contact form.

What happens then:

• We check the claim against the source document rather than against another article.
• If the page is wrong, we fix it and update the page’s modified date. Where a correction changes the substance of a recommendation, we note it on the page.
• If the page is right, we reply explaining the source. Sometimes the page is right but unclear, and that gets rewritten too.

Review cadence

Pages are revisited when something changes, not on a schedule. The specific triggers we watch: a model being discontinued, a manufacturer changing a warranty term, a new code edition being adopted, a federal or state incentive changing, and a reader showing us an error. A last-updated date on this site reflects an actual revision — we do not bump dates automatically to look fresh.

Use of AI tools

AI tools may assist with drafting and structuring content on this site. Every factual claim in a published page is checked against a named source by a person, and Brijon M. is accountable for the page. No page is published on the strength of a model’s output alone, and no source citation on this site was generated without the document being retrieved.

Independence

No brand has paid for coverage, a position or a review here, and there is no sponsored content on this site. We earn affiliate commission on qualifying purchases, which is disclosed above the first affiliate link on every page that has one and explained in full in the affiliate disclosure.