What this site is for

the point

Skills first, numbers to back them

Most of what gets sold in this corner of the internet runs on fear, and fear sells things people do not need. We would rather hand you the number. How many gallons your household drinks in a week. What a month of food costs where you live, this month. How long the power actually stays off in your state. With that in hand you can decide for yourself, and most of the time the answer costs nothing.

Everything here is about water, food and power at a normal house. Not a bunker, not a homestead in the mountains, and not a personality. A garden, a kitchen, a cupboard and a fuse box.

the method

Every number carries its source and its date

Trust in online reviews has fallen through the floor, and most readers now go looking for the bad review first to see whether a site is honest. We take that as the design brief. So: the rainfall figures come from NOAA and say which thirty-year period they cover. The outage hours come from the federal Electric Power Annual and say which year. The grocery prices come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and say which month. Where we calculate something ourselves, the page says the formula is ours.

And where the data is thin, we print that too. The state outage table shows how much of each state the report actually covers, because a figure built on sixteen percent of Alabama is a hint, not a measurement.

how we stay honest

The rules we hold ourselves to

We have not used the products we review. Every review says so at the top. What we do instead is measure the problem the product claims to solve, using the same public data as everywhere else on the site.

Affiliate links live on four pages and nowhere else. If you buy through one, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Those four pages are gathered in Products and each says so next to every button. The nine calculators and every guide carry none.

No invented testimonials, ever. No fabricated experience, no stock photograph presented as a customer, no claim that a plant cures anything, no countdown timer.

We correct in public. If a number here is wrong, write to us and we fix it and say that we did.

Some of this is written with AI assistance, checked against the sources named on each page by a person who is accountable for it. The data is not invented and the sources are there for you to open.

the paperwork

Contact and the legal pages

Write to [email protected] with a correction, a question, or a product you want measured. The contact page has the rest, and the privacy policy and terms of use say what we collect and what we promise.

Nothing on this site is medical, legal, financial or engineering advice for your specific situation.