Editorial policy

What we will and will not publish, how sourcing works, and what happens when we get something wrong.

By Scooter M.Last reviewed September 7, 2026

Independence

Renter Volt is funded by affiliate commission and by nothing else. No manufacturer, retailer or network has any input into what appears here, in what order, or how it is described. Nobody has ever paid for a placement here and nobody will — the disclosure page sets out exactly how commission is kept out of the ranking.

We have accepted no free products, no review samples and no loans of hardware. That is partly principle and partly circumstance — but the consequence matters more than the reason: it is why this site does not and cannot claim to have tested anything.

Claims this site will never make

That we tested, measured, owned, installed or used any product on this site.
That there is a lab, a bench, a test fleet, an expert panel or a technical review board behind it.
That the author holds a credential — electrician, engineer, certified installer — that they do not hold.
Any claim of tenure: long-time, veteran, seasoned, years of experience, since a given year.
A star rating, a review count or an aggregate rating, because we have no first-party review data to build one from.
A price we did not fetch live, in body copy or in structured data.
A specification we could not source to the manufacturer's own documentation.
A compatibility claim with no date attached, because connector standards are actively changing and undated claims rot silently.

Sourcing standards

Every specification figure cites the manufacturer's own documentation — a spec page, a manual, or a product page. Not a retailer listing and not another publication.
Every safety claim cites the standard behind it: the NEC article, the UL listing, the ampacity behavior. Safety guidance is never paraphrased loosely.
Every page carries a Sources section listing what it relied on, with links.
Where a figure cannot be sourced, the page says it is not published rather than estimating it.
Where a dealer or distributor listing is the only place a figure appears, the citation says so rather than implying it came from the manufacturer.

Corrections

Corrections are welcome and they are the cheapest quality control available to a site like this one. The process:

Send it — the contact form has a “correction” option, or email info@rentervolt.com directly.
We check it against the manufacturer's current documentation. If the manufacturer disagrees with us, the manufacturer is right.
Factual errors are fixed as soon as they are confirmed, and the page's last-reviewed date is updated to reflect a real change.
Substantive corrections — anything that changes a recommendation or a safety-relevant figure — are noted on the page rather than fixed silently.
Typographical and formatting fixes are made without a note. Nobody needs a changelog entry for a comma.

We do not remove criticism, and we do not quietly change a recommendation to match what a manufacturer would prefer. If a pick is wrong, the honest fix is to say it was wrong.

How products are added and removed

Added when they pass the four filters on the methodology page: renter-installable, currently sold, safety-listed, and specifications published.
Removed when they are discontinued, when they stop being available at a retailer we can link to, or when a safety listing is withdrawn.
Re-ranked whenever a quarterly review changes the reasoning — not when a commission rate changes, which is not a reason and never will be.
Never added because a manufacturer asked. Nobody has, and the answer would be no.

Update cadence

Daily: automated live price refresh. It deliberately does not touch any page's last-reviewed date — a site claiming every page changed every day teaches search engines to stop believing the field.
Monthly: availability check on every linked product.
Quarterly: full re-review of every roundup, with specifications re-checked and the last-reviewed date updated for real.
Quarterly: connector and vehicle compatibility re-checked against manufacturer sources.
On any content change: the AI-search files at /llms.txt and /llms-full.txt are updated to match.

Who writes it

Scooter M. writes everything here, and every page carries that byline. There is no anonymous staff and no contributor network — a single named person is a weaker signal than a masthead, and it is the true one. More about who that is.

Use of AI

Drafting and research assistance on this site involve AI tools. That does not change any of the standards above: every specification is still checked against the manufacturer’s own documentation, every source link is real and was retrieved, and no figure ships that could not be traced. If you find something that reads as plausible but is not true, that is exactly the kind of error worth reporting — and it would be a failure of the process described here, not an accepted cost of it.