Editorial policy

Editorial policy

Independence, sourcing, corrections, and the claims we refuse to make.

Flame & Flagstone earns Amazon Associates commissions on qualifying purchases made through its links. That is the entire business model and it is disclosed on every commercial page as well as on the affiliate disclosure.

The honest thing to say about that arrangement is that it creates a pull. A site paid on purchases has an interest in recommending purchases. Three things push back:

• We publish the arithmetic. A recommendation that does not survive its own numbers is visible to every reader, not just to us. That is a harder constraint than good intentions.
• We say when the answer is not a product. On several pages here the recommendation is a windbreak, a second cylinder, or moving the chairs out of the wind. None of those pays much and all of them are what we would tell a friend.
• Commission rates play no part in ranking. They are not an input to any list on this site, and no product's position has ever been adjusted for what it pays.

We accept no free samples, no review units, no gifts, no sponsored posts, no paid links and no payment for placement. If that ever changes, this page changes first and the disclosure appears on the affected pages.

• Specifications come from the maker. Heat output, wattage, fuel type and safety listings are taken from manufacturer documentation or the manufacturer's own listing — never from a retailer's marketing copy, never from a competitor's article, never from memory.
• Energy prices are named and dated. Electricity and propane prices come from published EIA series, cited on the page with the period they cover. When they move, we update the constant and every page recomputes.
• Physical constants are cited. Propane energy content, density and the BTU-to-kWh conversion all carry a source link.
• Clearances are quoted from a manufacturer, never asserted by us, and always alongside the instruction that your own unit's manual is the authority.
• Where nothing is published, we say so. "The maker publishes no coverage figure" is a sentence that appears on this site, because it is more useful than a number we made up.

• That we tested, used, owned or measured any product. We have not.
• That the author holds a credential he does not hold. There is no engineer, no gas fitter, no electrician and no expert panel behind this site.
• A star rating, a score out of ten, or any aggregate rating — and no rating markup is emitted to search engines.
• A price from memory. Prices render only from the live data layer, and any figure older than 48 hours is suppressed automatically.
• A review, testimonial or quote from a reader. There are none on this site, and none will be invented to fill a layout.

Getting a number wrong is a normal outcome of publishing numbers, and the response is to fix it visibly. When a figure here is wrong we correct the page, and where the error changed a recommendation we say what it was and what it is now. We do not silently edit a conclusion and leave the page looking as though it always said that.

This is easier to do here than in most places, because the arithmetic is on the page. A reader can disagree with a specific step rather than with a verdict, which makes a correction a factual matter instead of an argument.

Send corrections to our contact page or straight to info@flameandflagstone.com. Naming the page and the figure gets it fixed fastest.

Every page carries a last-reviewed date. Pages are revisited when the underlying facts move — an energy price series updates, a manufacturer revises a specification, a product stops being sold — rather than on a schedule designed to refresh a timestamp. A date that changed without the content changing would be a small lie in the same family as all the others this page rules out.

Everything here is written by Scooter M., whose position is set out plainly on the about page: an enthusiast who reads the manuals and does the arithmetic, with no lab coat and no test rig. There is no anonymous editorial team, and no byline on this site refers to a person who does not exist.