Editorial standards
Sourcing, updating, corrections, and money.
Sourcing
Fuel prices come from the U.S. Energy Information Administration through its public API, and the exact dataset and months are named on the methodology page and in the data file itself. Physical constants are standard engineering values and are listed with their conventions rather than embedded silently in code.
Where a figure is an assumption rather than a measurement, it is labelled as one and made adjustable.
Updating
Rates are refreshed when EIA publishes a new complete heating season. Every page states the months its figures come from, so a reader can tell how current the answer is without guessing.
When a state's verdict changes between refreshes, the change is recorded in the corrections log with both the old and the new figures.
Corrections
Errors are published rather than quietly edited. A correction names what was wrong, what it changed, and what the numbers were before and after. Pages are not silently rewritten to hide a previous answer.
What this site will not do
- Declare a winner inside the 10% margin where fuel price movement makes the difference meaningless.
- Present a national average as though it applied to a specific state.
- Use a summer fuel price to answer a heating question.
- Claim experience or credentials the author does not hold.
Money and conflicts of interest
At the time of writing this site carries no advertising and no affiliate links, and earns nothing. If advertising or affiliate revenue is added, it will be disclosed here and on the about page before it goes live.
The author sells no heating equipment and takes no money from manufacturers, installers, or utilities. No advertiser or sponsor will see a verdict before publication, and no verdict will be altered to suit one. If the arithmetic says a heat pump costs more to run in your state, the page will say so.
Use of AI
Drafting and code assistance were used in building this site. Every figure, source, and verdict was checked by the author against the underlying data. The summer gas price error described in the corrections log was found by that checking process, not by the drafting.