Editorial policy
How the guides here get written.
People use our articles to make real decisions: what to document for insurance, when to service the furnace, whether an extended warranty is worth it. That deserves a clear account of how the content is made. This page is that account.
Last updated July 2026
Our principles
What every guide is held to.
Accurate before fast
A guide that publishes a week later is fine. A guide that gets the insurance advice wrong is not. When we can't confirm something, we say so plainly or leave it out.
Plain English
Warranties and claims are complicated enough on their own. We write the way a knowledgeable neighbor explains things: specific, unhurried, and free of jargon.
Useful over impressive
You should finish a guide knowing what to do next, not just knowing more. Every article is checked against one question: could a reader act on this today?
Honest about limits
We are not lawyers, insurance agents, or licensed contractors, and our guides never pretend otherwise. Where professional advice matters, we tell you to get it.
Respect for your time
No padding to please a search engine, and no scare tactics to set up a sale. If an article can be shorter, it gets shorter.
Written to last
Home advice ages slowly, but it does age. Publishing a guide here comes with the obligation to come back to it, so guides are maintained, not abandoned.
Research
How we research articles.
Every guide starts with a question homeowners actually ask, usually one we've been asked ourselves. From there, the research draws on a short list of places we trust:
- Manufacturer documentation: manuals, warranty terms, and care instructions for the products a guide covers.
- Government guidance on home safety, insurance, and disaster preparedness.
- Insurance industry guidance on documentation, coverage, and claims.
- Published maintenance standards for how often things need attention and roughly what they cost.
- Real situations from people who use HomeRecall, and from our own houses.
- What building HomeRecall teaches us about how records actually get kept, and lost.
What we don't do is round up other blogs and average them. If the only place a claim exists is someone else's listicle, it doesn't go in.
Verification
How we verify information.
We'll be plain about this: HomeRecall does not have a separate fact-checking department. We're a small team, and inventing one on a page about honesty would defeat the point.
What we do instead is simple and real. Every article is read and reviewed by a person before it publishes. Specific figures, dates, and coverage claims are checked against the sources above, and anything we can't trace gets cut or rewritten to say clearly that it's uncertain.
Verification also doesn't stop at publication. When better information reaches us, from a reader, a manufacturer, or our own rereading, we update the article rather than defend it.
Updates
How articles are updated.
Every article shows the date it was last updated, both in the byline at the top and in the information box at the end. If those dates look stale to you, that's worth telling us about in itself.
We reread our guides on a rolling basis and revise them when products change, prices move, or standard advice shifts. Small fixes, a corrected link or a clearer sentence, happen quietly. When the advice itself changes, the article is revised and the updated date changes with it.
And when a guide has drifted far enough that patching would leave a mess, we rewrite it. An article that no longer earns its place gets reworked or removed, not left up for the traffic.
Corrections
Our corrections policy.
Four things count as a correction here, and we want to hear about all of them:
- Factual errors: a wrong figure, date, coverage claim, or how-to step.
- Broken links, whether to our own pages or anywhere else.
- Outdated recommendations: advice that was right when written and isn't anymore.
- Misleading phrasing: anything technically true that leaves the wrong impression.
When a reader reports a problem, we check it against the sources, fix what's confirmed, and refresh the article's updated date. We reply to everyone who reports something, usually within five business days, including when we conclude the original text was right and explain why.
Sources
Sources and citations.
Our guides are written as plain prose for homeowners, not academic papers, so you won't find footnotes. The standard behind the text is a simple order of preference:
- Official documentation from the manufacturer, for anything about a specific product.
- Government sources, for safety, insurance, and preparedness guidance.
- Industry organizations, for standards and typical costs.
- Our own product experience, always described as exactly that.
The rule underneath the list: the closer a source sits to the thing itself, the more we trust it. “Experts say” is not a source, and it doesn't appear in our guides.
What we don't do
The lines we won't cross.
We don't publish sponsored content.
No paid placements, no sponsored rankings, no affiliate quotas. If that ever changes, the article will say so at the top, not in the fine print.
We don't invent statistics.
A number appears in a guide because we found it somewhere checkable, not because it made a sentence more persuasive.
We don't invent people.
Articles are credited to the HomeRecall editorial team because that's who writes them. No fictional experts, no fake reviewers, no borrowed credentials.
We don't write fake reviews.
Not of our own product, and not of anyone else's.
We don't publish misleading comparisons.
When we write about a competitor, we describe what it actually does, including the places it beats us. A comparison you can't trust is worse than none.
We don't let SEO write the article.
We'd like to be found in search, but a guide's job is to answer your question, not to hold you on the page for a ranking.
If you ever catch us breaking one of these, tell us. Publicly is fine.
Seen something wrong? Tell us.
A factual error, a broken link, advice that's gone stale, or a guide you wish existed: we want to hear about it. Include a link to the article and what you spotted, and we'll reply within five business days.
Contact the editorial teamEvery report is read by a person.