Ellis Hartley

I'm Ellis Hartley. I run Homyprovement, and I write everything on it.

Fifteen years of renovating my own properties taught me one habit that turned into a publication: reading the installation manual before the marketing page. Manuals are published as PDFs before you buy, almost nobody opens them, and they contain the numbers that actually decide whether a product works in your house — the slope limit, the clearance with the lid open, the breaker requirement, the torque specification.

Marketing pages contain adjectives. Manuals contain constraints. The constraints are more useful.

What I write about#

Seven categories, chosen because they share a problem. The products are expensive, they arrive on a pallet or a truck, and returning one is genuinely painful. Outdoor structures, laundry appliances, water heating, lawn equipment, concrete tools, electric utility vehicles and adjustable beds.

Those are the purchases where research pays for itself, and where the existing coverage is weakest — a great deal of what ranks for these searches is a manufacturer's bullet points reworded with a star rating attached.

How I work#

I am not a testing lab and I do not pretend to be. I do not receive review units, I do not have a dynamometer, and I do not write "I ran it for six months" about products I have not held. What I do is read the specification sheet, the installation manual, the warranty document and the governing code, then convert everything into figures that can actually be compared.

That approach turns up things the marketing does not mention. A gazebo advertised with a five-year warranty that warrants the roof for five years and the frame for one. A pergola whose own listing publishes two snow ratings that disagree by 25%. A washer rated at 60 decibels, measured during the wash cycle and not the spin.

Where I do have genuine first-hand experience with something — and on outdoor structures and concrete work I have a fair amount — I label it as first-hand and keep it separate from the specification work. The full methodology, including the scoring rubric, is on how we review.

Independence#

No sponsored content. No paid placement. No review units. No guest posts, and no link insertions at any price.

The site is funded by affiliate commissions, disclosed above the first link on every article that carries one. The mechanics — including why the codebase is arranged so commission rates cannot influence what an article says — are on our affiliate disclosure.

Several products here score in the sevens with prominent criticism attached, and one review recommends renting instead of buying for most readers. That is what the method produces when you follow it.

Corrections#

If I have something wrong, tell me. Corrections are the most useful thing anyone sends and they always get a reply — get in touch. I correct in public with a dated note on the article rather than editing quietly, and the policy is on our editorial policy.

Content on this site is editor-directed and fact-checked, and where AI assistance is used in production that is disclosed plainly on the editorial policy page rather than hidden.