Editorial Policy

Picks are editorial and are never sold

No brand pays for placement on this site, influences a ranking, or sees a page before it publishes. There is no sponsored content, no paid review and no advertorial anywhere on Block & Beaker, and if that ever changes it will be labeled on the page rather than in a policy nobody reads.

We earn affiliate commission when you buy through our links. That is disclosed above the first affiliate link on every page, not only in the footer, and it is set out in full on the disclosure page.

We do not accept free products

True at launch and easy to keep true, so it is worth recording. Nothing on this site was supplied by a manufacturer, and no manufacturer has been contacted for a sample.

This is less virtuous than it sounds: we do not test products, so there would be nothing to do with a sample. But it does mean there is no relationship anywhere in the chain that a recommendation could be influenced by.

Every roundup names something to skip

Every roundup on this site includes at least one product we recommend against, with the reason stated. A site that likes everything is useless to somebody choosing, and a page with five picks and five recommendations has not made a judgment.

The skip is chosen on the same published information as the picks. It is usually one of three things: a product being sold for the wrong age, a product whose published contents are much smaller than its price implies, or a good product that is frequently bought for the wrong reason.

No ratings, no testing claims

We have not tested these products. There are no star ratings, no scores, no aggregate ratings and no rating markup in the structured data behind these pages, because a rating we generated would assert testing we did not do.

The phrases used across much of this category to describe hands-on work do not appear anywhere on this site describing our own. Neither do credential claims for the author. The reasoning is on how we pick.

Sourcing standards

Every factual claim about a product traces to one of these:

• The manufacturer’s own product page, manual or spec sheet
• A published safety standard, cited by name
• The live price layer, date-stamped
• Arithmetic performed on the above, with the inputs stated

Explicitly not accepted as sources: our own memory, another affiliate site’s claims, marketing copy restated as fact, and any number we cannot point at. Where a manufacturer publishes nothing on a point, the page says “not published” rather than filling the gap.

Prices

Every price on this site renders from a live data layer that reads from the retailer, and every price is date-stamped on the page. No price is ever typed into a template.

When the price data is older than 48 hours it stops rendering entirely and the page shows “check price” instead. A stale number is worse than no number, because it is a claim rather than an absence.

We do not describe anything as a deal, a bargain or a discount. We have no way to verify that a price is good, and neither does anyone else writing these lists.

Corrections

Corrections are made on the page, with the change reflected in the page’s visible last-updated date. We do not correct silently.

If you tell us a figure is wrong, we check it against the manufacturer’s published source and correct within 48 hours of confirming. The fastest way to reach us is info@blockandbeaker.com or the contact form, and the most useful message is a page URL plus the number you expected.

Update cadence

• Prices: continuously, from the live layer.
• Pick lists: quarterly, for discontinuations and new models.
• Specifications and piece counts: semi-annually, or whenever a manufacturer revises them.
• Safety standard citations: annually, or on a standard revision or a recall.
• Last-updated dates: changed only on a substantive edit. A false freshness signal is still a false signal, so we do not bump dates to look active.

Discontinued products

A dead buy button is a trust failure rather than a broken link. When a product is discontinued we replace the pick rather than leaving a link that resolves to nothing, and the live price layer fails to “check price” rather than to a blank or a stale number.

No testimonials, ever

Block & Beaker has no customers and sells nothing, so there is nobody to ask for a review. There are no testimonials on this site, no reviewer quotes and no star ratings from anybody — including us. If you ever see one here, something has gone badly wrong and we would like to know.