This page sets out the rules we hold ourselves to. It exists so that a reader — or an advertiser, or a contractor who disagrees with us — can check our behaviour against a written standard.
Independence
SewerLine Lab is funded exclusively by display advertising served programmatically. We do not accept:
- referral fees, lead payments or per-call commissions from contractors;
- sponsored articles, paid placements or “partner content”;
- paid or exchanged links of any kind;
- affiliate commission on repairs, warranties, service plans or insurance products;
- free work, discounts or gifts from companies we write about.
Advertisers are selected by an ad network, not by us. We do not know in advance which companies will appear, we cannot remove a competitor at anyone’s request, and the appearance of an ad carries no editorial meaning whatsoever.
Separation of advertising and editorial
Advertisements are visually distinct from editorial content and carry a label. Nothing in the running text of an article is paid for. Where a product category is discussed — sewer line warranties, for example — the discussion is descriptive and we name no preferred vendor, because that is precisely the grappling point where a publisher’s incentives most easily bend.
Who writes what
Content is written and reviewed by Chriss R., a building contractor with close to thirty years of estimating and project supervision experience and a background in industrial and maintenance engineering. Every article carries a named author and a review date. Where a topic sits outside that expertise — insurance contract law, municipal legal liability — we describe the general pattern, cite the source, and explicitly tell readers to verify locally rather than pretending to an authority we do not have.
Use of AI tools
We use software, including AI-assisted tools, for research support, drafting assistance, data structuring and language editing. We do not publish machine-generated text unchecked. Every published article is reviewed, corrected and signed off by a named human editor who is accountable for its accuracy. Where a figure is modelled rather than observed, the article says so.
What we will not publish
- Step-by-step instructions for work that requires a licence, a utility locate or a confined-space permit. Understanding the work well enough to buy it intelligently is the goal; attempting it is not.
- Fake precision. No point estimates for excavation work, no undated figures, no invented averages.
- Contractor rankings or “best of” lists. We have no way to verify workmanship at national scale, and such lists are almost always monetised.
- Recommendations of specific insurance or warranty products. We describe how such contracts generally work; choosing one is a financial decision for you and your adviser.
- Scare-marketing. If the honest answer is “monitor it, this can wait”, we publish that, even though it does not sell an emergency call-out.
Sourcing
Claims of fact are attributable. Cost figures trace back to the categories described in the Methodology and are listed in Data Sources. Regulatory claims cite the municipality, standard or code they come from. Where we rely on reader-submitted invoices, the data is anonymised before use.
Corrections
We correct errors promptly and openly.
- Minor corrections — typographical fixes, broken links, clarified wording — are made silently.
- Material corrections — a changed figure, a reversed conclusion, a misstated rule — are made and noted on the page, with the date.
- Withdrawals. If an article cannot be repaired, it is withdrawn and the URL explains why rather than disappearing.
Report an error to 
. You do not need to be polite about it; you need to be specific.
Updates and freshness
Cost content is re-pulled quarterly. Regulatory content is reviewed at least annually. Pages display the date of the most recent review, not just the original publication date, so you can judge for yourself whether a figure has aged.
Right of reply
If you are a contractor, a municipality or a company and you believe we have described you or your market unfairly, write to us. Substantiated objections are acted on. We do not remove accurate content because someone dislikes it, and we do not accept payment to alter, delay or delete an article.
Privacy of contributors
Readers who send us quotes or invoices are never identified without their explicit permission, and identifying details are stripped before the data enters our set. See the Privacy Policy.