Affiliate disclosure

The short version: we earn a commission when you buy through our links, it costs you nothing extra, and it does not decide what we recommend.

How the links work

Product links on this site carry an affiliate tag. If you click one and buy something, the retailer pays us a small percentage of the sale. The price you pay is exactly the same as it would be if you had navigated there yourself — the commission comes out of the retailer's margin, not out of your pocket.

Every outbound commercial link is marked rel="sponsored nofollow", which is how we tell search engines that the link is commercial. Commercial pages also carry a #ad marker beside every buy button.

What it does not change

• Which products appear. Nobody pays to be included and nobody has ever been offered the opportunity.
• The order they appear in. Rankings follow fit for the stated job. Where a cheaper product is the better buy, it ranks higher, and it earns us less.
• What we say about them. Every product entry carries a mandatory “skip this if” line naming who should not buy it.
• Whether we recommend buying at all. Several pages here conclude that the fix is free — clear the gutters, extend a downspout, re-route the discharge. Those pages earn nothing and they are some of the most useful on the site.

Why there are no prices

You will not find a dollar figure anywhere on this site. Prices in this category move constantly, and a number typed into an article in October is misleading by November. Rather than publish stale figures, every buy button sends you to the current listing, where the price is whatever it actually is today.

The same applies to contractor costs. We describe what drives a quote rather than inventing a national average that matches nobody's situation.

Which retailers

Amazon is the default retailer for products on this site. Where another merchant is named on a page as a source of specifications, that link is a citation rather than a commercial link and we earn nothing from it.

Where a product is not currently resolvable to a specific listing, the link goes to a tagged search for that exact model rather than to a guessed product page that might send you to the wrong item.

Why we tell you this

The Federal Trade Commission requires material connections between a publisher and a seller to be disclosed clearly and conspicuously. We agree with the rule, and we would disclose this anyway: a reader who knows how a site is funded can weigh what it says, and a site that hides it has already told you something about its judgment.

How recommendations are actually produced is set out at how we pick, and the full editorial rules are in the editorial policy.

Questions

If anything here is unclear, email contact@sumpandseal.com. Sump & Seal is published by MadGrey LLC.