How We Review
The most important page on this site, because it is the one that tells you what our recommendations are actually built on — and what they are not.
Last reviewed
That statement is at the top rather than buried at the bottom because it is the single most useful thing a reader can know about a site like this. A new publisher with no lab has two options: claim testing it did not do, or be explicit about what it actually did. The second is the only one that survives a reader who checks.
What we do, in order
- Verify the product is real and currently sold. Against the manufacturer's own product page and live retailer listings. A discontinued model is either removed or explicitly flagged as discontinued — as the Google Nest Protect is throughout this site, because Google stopped producing it in March 2025.
- Check the safety listing and record what it tests. UL 217 for smoke alarms, UL 2034 for CO alarms, UL 711 for portable extinguishers, EN 1869 for fire blankets. Recording what the listing tests matters as much as recording that it exists — UL 2034, for instance, forbids a CO alarm from alarming below 30 ppm, which is the whole reason low-level monitors exist as a separate category.
- Read the manufacturer's manual. For sensor type, service life, power, interconnect limits and stated limitations. The manual is where the awkward facts live, and it is usually the only document a manufacturer is careful in.
- Check the placement and quantity implications against NFPA 72 and the residential code. A product recommendation that ignores where the thing has to go is incomplete advice. On this site the code work is a section of its own.
- Cross-reference organizations that actually test. Consumer Reports for laboratory testing, CPSC for recall notices, UL for listing questions. When we rely on their findings we name them in the sentence rather than hiding them behind a link.
- Record known failure modes, recalls and nuisance behavior. Including the ones that make a product look worse. Every roundup and review on this site carries a 'do not buy this if' clause for each pick, and if we cannot write one honestly we have not understood the product yet.
How the scores work
Roundups score each pick on four to six criteria chosen for that category, out of ten, with an overall figure. The criteria are always visible on the page, so you can disagree with our weighting rather than with an unexplained number.
Those scores are our editorial judgment. They are not measurements, and they never appear in this site’s structured data as product review ratings — marking an opinion up as a tested rating would contradict the statement at the top of this page, and it is exactly the kind of thing that gets a site a structured-data penalty it deserves.
We also do not aggregate retailer star ratings. A four-and-a-half star average on a fire blanket is a measure of how the packaging arrived, because almost none of those reviewers have had a fire.
What disqualifies a product
- An open CPSC recall, until it is resolved.
- No published safety listing in a category where one exists — an unlisted smoke alarm or CO alarm is not a product we will rank at any position.
- A manufacturer that will not publish specifications. If we cannot find out what the sensor is or what the unit is listed to, we cannot tell you anything worth knowing about it.
- Discontinuation. A product that is no longer made comes out of the roundups within 30 days, because on a life-safety page a dead link is a trust failure and not just a revenue leak.
Note what is not on that list: a low score. A product can be listed, documented, currently sold and still a poor buy, and saying so is the job.
Why there are no prices
Prices change constantly and a cached number on a page is wrong more often than it is right. Rather than publish a figure that is stale by the time you read it, every buy link on this site says check price and sends you to the live listing. If we ever start showing prices they will carry a visible “as of” date and they will disappear automatically once they are more than 48 hours old.
How commission affects rankings
It does not, and here is the mechanism rather than the promise. All the money links on this site currently go to one retailer at one commission rate, so there is no rate to optimize between products. Where a cheaper or better-stocked option pays less, it still goes first — the buyer’s interest wins, because a reader who follows a bad recommendation does not come back.
Full details are on the affiliate disclosure page, and the separation of editorial and commercial is set out in the editorial policy.
How often we re-check these pages
- Roundups, comparisons and reviews: re-checked at least every six months, and immediately if a product is discontinued, recalled or replaced.
- Placement and code pages: annually, and immediately on any new NFPA 72 or residential code edition.
- Safety guides: annually, and immediately on any CDC or CPSC guidance change.
Every page carries a visible “last reviewed” date, and that date only moves when the page has actually been re-checked. Bumping a date to look fresh is the same category of deception as claiming a test we did not run.
Reporting an error
Email contact@sirenandsafe.com or use the contact form, which has a category for corrections. The page URL and the sentence you think is wrong are all we need. Material errors get a dated correction note on the page itself rather than a silent edit.