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SwimSolar
Affiliate disclosure

How this site is funded

Commission, from links you click. Here is exactly how that works and what it does not buy.

Last updated

In plain English

If you click a link on this site and buy something, this site earns a commission from the retailer. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid otherwise — the commission comes out of the retailer’s margin, not your pocket.

That is how this site is paid for. There is no subscription, no paywall, no newsletter you have to join and no advertising.

What commission does not buy

It does not buy a ranking. Nobody has ever paid to appear on this site, to appear higher on it, or to have a competitor appear lower. There is no arrangement under which that could happen.

The clearest evidence is in the recommendations themselves: our overall solar cover pick is a 12-mil cover rather than the more expensive 16-mil one, because the only published hands-on comparison in this category found no heating difference between them and the cheaper one is easier to actually use. We also tell people to buy a reel before buying a better cover, and to buy a hundred-dollar cover before a three-thousand-dollar heater. None of that is the commission-maximizing advice.

The numbers we keep at zero

0

Units we claim to have tested

0

Sponsored placements

0

Free products accepted

No manufacturer has sent us a product, paid for a placement, reviewed a draft, or had any input into a word on this site. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on the page it affects, prominently, not in a footnote here.

How the links work, technically

Every commercial link on this site passes through /go/ before reaching the retailer. That does two things: it lets us record that the click happened, and it means the destination for a product lives in one configuration file rather than being typed into a hundred articles.

  • Our Amazon Associates tracking ID is swimandsolar-20. It is public by nature and it is the only one used here.
  • Every earning link carries rel="sponsored nofollow", as Google’s link policy requires.
  • The /go/ URLs are excluded from search engines and are not indexed.
  • Citation links are never wrapped. A link to the Department of Energy, the EIA, the USGS, NASA or a manufacturer’s documentation goes straight there and earns nothing. On a site whose entire argument is “check my arithmetic against the source”, monetizing the source would be self-defeating as well as dishonest.

Prices

Prices and availability come from the retailer and change constantly. Where a live price is shown here it is the one we last verified, with the date; where we cannot verify one, the button reads “check price” and no number is shown.

We never print a remembered price. That is structural rather than a promise: there is no second price source anywhere in this site’s code, and any price older than 48 hours disappears by itself.

Which retailers

Amazon, currently, and only Amazon. This is a new site and we have not joined any other affiliate network, so there are no links here to programs we are not part of — which is a rule we hold to even where such a program plainly exists.

Where a product genuinely is not sold through anything we are part of, the page says so and shows no buy button rather than sending you somewhere useless. Installed automatic and safety cover systems are the main example in this category: they are dealer-fitted, we earn nothing on them either way, and we cover them anyway when the reader’s question is real.

What we would like you to do about it

Nothing in particular. Use the links if they are convenient and the price is right, and do not if it is not — checking a couple of retailers before buying anything is sensible and we would rather you did.

What would genuinely help is telling us when we are wrong. The arithmetic is published so it can be checked, and info@swimandsolar.com reaches us.

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