How we grade
Three grades. Every entry gets exactly one, and every entry has to show its arithmetic to keep it. Right now the index holds 49 entries: 18 proven, 19 plausible, 12 to avoid.
◆ Proven
The numbers hold up and the failure modes are known. Build it.
To earn this, a thing needs numbers that hold up under checking and failure modes that are known and manageable. Proven does not mean risk-free or right for everybody — it means that if you follow the entry, you will get roughly the result it describes, and the ways it can go wrong are listed.
◇ Plausible
It really works — but there's a catch big enough that it decides whether it works for you.
This is the most useful grade on the site and the one most entries land in. It means the thing genuinely works — the physics is real, people have done it — but there is a condition, a climate, a scale, or a maintenance burden that decides whether it works for you. The zeer pot is the cleanest example: it is real refrigeration in Arizona and does almost nothing in Georgia, and no video ever mentions which one it was filmed in.
✕ Avoid
Looks wonderful on video. Falls apart under testing, or under arithmetic.
An entry earns this when controlled testing has been done and it failed, or when the arithmetic simply does not work out — like sprouted fodder, where the famous “one pound becomes seven” claim is true by weight and a 17% loss by dry matter. Avoid is never about taste. It is about evidence.
The standing rule
Name the numbers. Name the catch. Name the grade. If a trick cannot survive having those three things written down beside it, it does not go in the index. That rule is why some genuinely popular ideas are missing — not because they are wrong, but because nobody has produced a number for them yet.
What we do not do
- No affiliate links. Not one, anywhere on this site. The prices shown are planning figures, not offers, and nothing here earns a commission.
- No safety numbers from memory or from a model. Canning times, cure ratios, kill-step temperatures and water treatment come from tested sources — USDA, NCHFP, your extension service — and nowhere else. An AI that is right 95% of the time is a fine tool for most of this list and an unacceptable one for botulism.
- No hype about collapse. This is a site about things that work. It is not a site about being afraid.
How a grade changes
A grade is a current best read, not a verdict. Field reports beat opinions: if you build something here and it performs better than we said, or fails in a way we did not warn about, that is the most valuable information anybody can send. When a grade changes, the entry says so and says why.
The only permanent thing on this site is the rule that everything has to show its numbers — including us.