Editorial policy

Nine guides sit on the front page of this site. This is how they get written.

Where the numbers come from

Material behaviour, melting points and the temperatures at which things go wrong are general properties, not claims about a particular batch. Tempering temperatures come from a chocolate school's published curve and are credited to it. Guidance on damp, mould and candle safety comes from public bodies, and each source is listed with the date we read it.

Sources are read before they are cited

Every link in the sources list was opened and read, and the sentence on the page was written from the source rather than the source being found afterwards to prop up a sentence already written. Two of the sources are there to hold us back rather than to support a claim.

The sources themselves

Named on the guides that use them, and linked here.

US Environmental Protection Agency: Guide to Air Cleaners in the Home. Activated carbon works, the EPA says, when there is a large amount of material in the filter, and no air cleaner removes everything in the air of a home. Both halves of that sentence shaped how the charcoal pages here are written. Read 2026-08-02.
US Environmental Protection Agency: A Brief Guide to Mold, Moisture and Your Home. Keep indoor humidity below 60 per cent, ideally between 30 and 50. Mould control is moisture control, and a bag of charcoal is not moisture control. That is why the section on damp smells sends you to fix the water first. Read 2026-08-02.
G. San Miguel, S. D. Lambert and N. J. D. Graham, Water Research 35(11): The regeneration of field-spent granular-activated carbons (2001). Spent carbon recovers most of its adsorption capacity when it is heated to 800 °C. A windowsill does not reach 800 °C, so sunning a bag is described here as drying it out, not as making it new. Read 2026-08-02.
US Fire Administration: Candle fire safety. Twelve inches from anything that burns, out when you leave the room, and not in a bedroom. Twenty home candle fires are reported on an average day, which is the reason the candle-making section ends on safety rather than on scent. Read 2026-08-02.
National Candle Association: Fire safety and candles. Wick trimmed to a quarter inch before every burn, candles three inches apart, and stop while half an inch of wax is left. These are the numbers behind the pour-and-burn advice on this page. Read 2026-08-02.
L’École Valrhona: Tempering chocolate: the three temperatures. The melt, cool and working temperatures for dark, milk and white chocolate. The table in the tempering section is theirs; the water-bath method around it is ours. Read 2026-08-02.

What we refuse to say

That a bag of charcoal purifies air, kills bacteria or removes mould.
That any product here has a laboratory report behind it, unless we have commissioned one and can show it. We have not.
That a figure is verified when it comes from our own packaging and we have not measured it.

Where our own material disagrees with itself

Two places, both published on the front page. One set is described in its own name as holding two 150 g bags while the pack graphic in the same gallery says 200 g; we publish the lower figure. And one dimension panel is reused across several pot sizes, so a capacity printed on a photograph does not always belong to the pot in it. Capacities on this site come from each set's own specification.

Corrections and dates

Every page carries the date the catalogue was last updated and the date the sources were last read. When a figure changes, the page changes and the date moves with it.

Advice this is not

Nothing here is medical, air-quality or fire-safety advice for your particular home. Where a question touches damp, gas or fire, the page says which body to go to instead of guessing.

Last updated 2026-08-21.