About Porch & Pond
Porch & Pond is a buying guide for the yard, the pool, the basement and the bathroom: bird feeders, wind chimes and bulbs, above-ground pools and home pumps, cabinet hardware and vanities, air purifiers, humidifiers and water filters sold on Amazon US. It reads makers' specifications and Amazon listings, sorts products by written rules and prints those rules on every list. It does not test products, rate them or show prices. When a value can't be confirmed, the table shows a dash.
The Haw River Road family are characters
The site is written as one family's porch notes. The house is a 1974 brick ranch on four acres outside Burlington, North Carolina, with a screened back porch that looks down a slope to a one-acre farm pond. There's a bird feeder pole by the porch steps, a short wooden dock, and a basement that has opinions about rain. Sunday dinner happens on the porch from April to October.
The three people who sign the pages are the site's recurring characters, written by the editors. They are personas, not real people. They have no licenses or credentials to offer, and they never claim to have bought, installed, tested, filled, hung or planted any product on this site.
- Dell Pruitt, 61, "the basement". A retired residential heating and air service tech who checks the sump pit before he checks the weather. Dell signs the Pools & Pumps and Clean Air & Water pages.
- Ana Pruitt, 59, "the feeder log". An elementary school librarian who keeps a feeder log in a composition notebook and a respectful rivalry with one gray squirrel. Ana signs the Garden & Birds pages, the home page, every gift page and the brand catalog.
- Ken Abe, 36, "square and level". A finish carpenter on a small remodeling crew, married to the Pruitts' daughter, slowly redoing a 1962 ranch in Greensboro one room at a time. Ken signs the Cabinet Hardware & Vanities pages and the new-homeowner pages.
The characters have opinions about kinds of products and yard habits. Each opinion comes with a reason you can check: a spec, a stated maker limit, a certification or a safety rule. They don't have opinions about how a particular product performed, because nobody here has used it. (Dell has opinions about the basement. The basement has not responded.)
How products are picked
Every product on the site is a real, named product listed on Amazon US, in one of four sections: Garden & Birds, Pools & Pumps, Cabinet Hardware & Vanities, and Clean Air & Water.
- Makers' specs first. Flow, lift, horsepower, room size, clean air delivery rate, tank size, center-to-center spacing, vanity width and similar values come from the maker's own pages and manuals.
- Amazon listings second. Where a maker is silent, a value may come from the Amazon listing, and the table marks it as a listing value.
- Some fields are read, never imported. Pump flow and horsepower, pool capacity, product dimensions and purifier room size are taken only from the maker or the listing text, never from Amazon's automatic data fields, which get them wrong too often.
- Claims stay claims. True HEPA, CARB certification, an NSF/ANSI standard, "ozone-free" or "squirrel-proof" appear only when the maker says so about that model, and a water filter is described only by the contaminants its named certification covers.
- No health claims. Air purifiers, humidifiers and water filters are described by what their listings and certifications state, never by what they might do for anyone's health.
- Written rules for every list. Each best-of list and gift page is built by a rule applied to the data, and the rule is printed with the list. If a rule leaves too few products, the list isn't published on its own.
- No ratings, no scores. The site doesn't give stars or points, and it doesn't rank products by taste.
Prices are never shown, because they change too often to print. The Check price button opens the Amazon page, which has the current price.
Availability on Amazon US is checked every week. A product that's gone is taken out of the tables. A brand with little or nothing left on Amazon US keeps its page, which says so plainly and shows similar products from other makers.
Facts that aren't about a product, such as planting times, sump pit sizing or pool safety, come from sources listed at the bottom of the page that uses them: university extension services, government agencies and makers' manuals. Pages about pools, electricity near water, ladders and heavy items carry a plain safety note.
How the site earns money
Porch & Pond is a participant in the Amazon Associates program. When you follow a Check price button and buy a qualifying item, Amazon may pay the site a commission, and your price stays the same. The details are on the disclosure page.
How to report an error
If a spec, a link or a sentence looks wrong, tell the editors through the contact page. Name the page and the value, and add a link to the maker's page if you have one. A correction with a source gets fixed first. (Ana will want the source anyway. She'll file it.)