Last reviewed: 7 September 2026.
This site is free to read and costs money to run. The plan is to pay for it with
advertising, and possibly with affiliate commission on some links to retailers. Neither is running
yet, so at the time of writing the site earns nothing at all. Nobody pays us for
coverage, for a position in a table or for a favourable conclusion. This page sets out, in advance,
exactly how each of those would work and what we will not do — so that you can hold us to it when
they start.
Where we stand today (7 September 2026). There are no adverts on
this site. There is not a single affiliate link on it either — every outbound link goes to a
regulator, a network operator, a standards body or a primary source, and we earn nothing from any of
them. We have no paid partnership with any retailer, manufacturer or installer. If that changes, this
page changes first and the date above changes with it.
1. Advertising
Not running yet. No advertising network is loaded on this site today, and no
advert has ever been shown on it. What follows is what will happen when advertising is switched on.
Adverts will be served programmatically by a third-party network. We will not choose the
advertisers, we will not be told who they are, and the presence of an advert on a page will have no
relationship to what that page says. If an advert for a plug-in solar retailer appears beside an
article explaining why a plug-in kit may not suit you, that is a coincidence produced by an ad
auction, not an endorsement.
We will cap advertising at five units per page and never place one above the main
heading of an article. That is a self-imposed limit, adopted because heavier loading makes pages
worse to read.
We have also decided to ask for contextual advertising rather than personalised
advertising: adverts matched to the page you are reading, not to a profile of you built from
your browsing. Advertising involves cookies and similar technologies, and none of them will be set
before you agree. What would be set, and how to refuse it, is in the
cookie policy.
2. Affiliate links
There are none on this site at present. We are not in any affiliate programme and
we have never been paid a commission on anything. If that changes, some links to retailers will be
affiliate links: if you follow one and buy something, we may receive a small commission from the
retailer. It would not change your price.
The rules we are committing to in advance:
- Any article whose subject is essentially the products we are linking to will say so
before you start reading it — in the title or immediately under it, not in a note
at the bottom. - Every affiliate link will be labelled where it appears, not only in a footer.
- Affiliate links will carry
rel="sponsored nofollow", so they pass no search authority. - Commission will never determine a recommendation, a ranking or a score. Where
two products are comparable and one pays us more, that fact will play no part in what we write, and
we will not report the commission rates because we do not want to be tempted to. - We will link to a retailer with no affiliate programme, and to a product we cannot earn from,
whenever that is the right answer.
3. What we do not do
- No paid placements or sponsored posts. No manufacturer has paid for a mention
and none will. - No guest posts or link insertions. These are the standard route by which niche
sites are quietly bought, and we do not accept them at any price. - No lead generation. There is no quotation form on this site. We do not collect
your details and pass them to installers, and we are not paid per enquiry by anybody. If that ever
changes, it will be announced on this page, in plain language, before any form appears. - No selling of personal data. Ever, to anyone.
- No fake urgency. Where there is a real deadline — such as the VAT change on 31
March 2027 — we describe it accurately, including the fact that the rate is expected to return to
5% rather than 20%, which is a considerably less alarming story than the one used to sell
batteries.
4. Why we tell you all this
Partly because advertising has to be identifiable as advertising: that is the position under the
UK advertising codes enforced by the
Advertising Standards
Authority, and consumer protection law enforced by the
Competition and Markets Authority takes the same view of
undisclosed commercial relationships.
And partly because it is the whole proposition of the site. This is a market where nearly every
guide is published by someone selling the product. We would rather tell you exactly where our money
comes from and let you weigh what we write accordingly, than pretend to a purity that no funded
publication has.
5. If you would rather we did not earn anything
Use an ad blocker and navigate to retailers directly rather than through our links. The site will
work identically and we will not know or mind. We would still rather you read it.
Questions
If anything here is unclear, or you think a link is not properly labelled, tell us on the
contact page and we will fix it.