Editorial Policy

Core Principles

• No editor's pick. Rankings are threshold-driven from real build cost, completeness, cost-per-watt, and cohort percentile. If two kits tie on the underlying metric, they tie on the page.
• No sponsor influence. Affiliate partnerships pay the same commission regardless of ranking. A kit will never move because of a retailer relationship.
• No hidden rewrites. Product descriptions come from retailer data feeds, lightly normalized for formatting. The site never invents specs.
• Cohort-based comparisons.A 2,000W kit is compared against other 2,000W kits, not against the whole dataset. Percentile labels ("best value", "most overpriced") are calculated against the relevant cohort.

How Rankings Are Generated

Every listing page — category, brand, use-case, budget, hub — pulls from the same retailer dataset. Kits are filtered by the page's scope, then ranked on a single metric (real build cost, cost per watt-hour, completeness, or use-case score). The ranking function is deterministic: same dataset, same order.

Verdict labels like "best true value" or "sticker-price trap" are generated by threshold rules, not written by hand. A kit carries the label only if the numbers qualify it on that page's cohort.

Conflict Rules

OffGridEmpire earns affiliate commissions from most retailers in the dataset. These relationships do not change rankings, labels, or verdicts. Specifically:

• No retailer sees the ranking logic before it ships.
• No retailer can request removal of a negative label for a kit that qualifies for it.
• No kit is excluded from the dataset because of commission rate.
• Affiliate disclosures appear sitewide; details live on the disclosure page.

Update Policy

Prices and stock status refresh every 6–12 hours. Kit metadata (included components, voltage, chemistry) is re-evaluated whenever the source feed changes the underlying spec. When a kit is delisted or its price becomes unrecoverable, the page is kept live but shows a "no current listing" notice and drops out of ranked tables.

Corrections

Any user can request a correction via contact. Corrections are investigated against the retailer feed. If a number is wrong, it is fixed and the next data export republishes everywhere the number appeared. We do not keep an ad-hoc override layer; a correction either lives in the data or it does not appear.

What This Policy Does Not Cover

• Retailer pricing decisions — we report, we do not set, retail prices.
• Product quality claims beyond what the spec sheet supports.
• Installation advice, warranty arbitration, or product returns.

For questions about specific numbers, start with how real build cost is calculated and full methodology.