The word Best appears in the title of this site's homepage and in eight roundup headlines. This page is what has to make that defensible. If anything below is not something we actually do, the word should come off the pages.
1. Inclusion criteria
A product is eligible to appear in a roundup only if all of the following are true at the time we check:
- It is currently purchasable through the live Amazon data layer, with a resolvable listing. A recommendation you cannot act on is not a recommendation.
- It is sold new, not refurbished or clearance-only.
- It carries a safety certification to an EVSE standard — UL 2594, or an equivalent ETL listing to that standard, or UL 2251/2252 for a coupler or adapter. A generic electrical mark on a 40 A continuous-duty device is not the same thing and does not qualify.
- Its published specifications are available from the manufacturer in a form we can cite. If we cannot find a figure, the page says the manufacturer does not publish it rather than estimating.
- The brand has an identifiable North American support path. A three-year warranty from a company with no US presence is a document, not a service.
Our current registry is 68 products across chargers, adapters, cables, installation hardware and mounting accessories. Everything we recommend is in it; nothing is recommended that is not.
2. Exclusion criteria
We exclude products, and these exclusions have cost us units that other sites recommend:
- Delisted or chronically out-of-stock units. A page recommending something nobody can buy is worse than a shorter page.
- Brands whose North American support status we cannot establish. This is the rule that removes most of the very cheap 48 A chargers from our lists. Some of them may be perfectly good products; we are not willing to put a buy button beside a 48 A continuous-duty device from a company we cannot reach.
- Brands whose North American operations have been publicly unstable. A charger is a ten-year purchase bolted to a house, and a recommendation that ages into an unsupported dead end is a failure even if the hardware was fine on the day we wrote it. JuiceBox / Enel X Way appears on several competitors' current lists and is a clear example of why this rule exists.
- Uncertified adapters for high-amperage applications. An adapter carries 40-48 A continuously for hours. Where we cannot establish certification to UL 2251 or 2252, we say so rather than implying it is fine.
- Passive splitters on shared circuits. A device that allows two loads onto one 30 A circuit simultaneously is not something we will link to. We cover automatic switching devices instead, and we say why.
3. What "verified" means on this site
Why state it so bluntly: because "expert tested" is the easiest claim in this category to make and the hardest for a reader to check, and several of the pages competing with ours make it without evidence. Our position is narrower and we can keep it. Specifically, we will never write:
- "In our testing..." about hardware we have not tested.
- "We installed one in our garage" unless we did, and we have not.
- "After 30 days of testing..."
- Any license, certification, degree or years-in-industry figure for our author that was not provided to us.
- A star rating or review count as text. Those render from live data or they do not appear.
For vehicles the standard is higher still, because the onboard AC rate decides the entire purchase: every one of the 20 vehicles we cover carries a manufacturer-cited figure with its source link, and none of those numbers was carried over from another page on this site or from a competitor.
4. How ranking order is decided
In this order, and the order itself is the method:
- Fit for the stated use case of that specific page. This is why the same charger ranks differently on different pages: the Emporia Pro is first on best Level 2 and the Lectron 40 A is first on best budget, because the question is different.
- Price, in the context of what the money buys.
- Warranty and support depth.
- Build and weather rating, weighted by whether the page is about an outdoor install.
5. The honesty requirements on every page
- Every review contains a genuine "what doesn't work" section. A review where nothing is wrong with the product is an advertisement. It is also the clearest tell that a site is not independent — if every product on a list scores 4.4 or above, the list is not assessing anything.
- Every review names an alternative, including when the alternative is cheaper or from a different brand.
- No price, rating or review count appears as text. Our content model has no field for them, so one cannot be authored.
- No page claims a federal tax credit for a residential charger installed after June 30, 2026, because the Section 30C credit expired then. A great deal of published advice still gets this wrong.
- No testimonials anywhere. We have no customers and nothing to review. A clean page beats an invented quote.
6. Re-verification cadence
| What | Cadence | Off-cycle trigger |
|---|---|---|
| Prices and availability | Continuous, via the live data layer | Automatic |
| Product roster and specifications on roundups and reviews | Quarterly | A major launch, a brand exit, or a delisting |
| Vehicle onboard AC rates | Annually | Each new model year; any mid-cycle hardware change |
| Incentive and rebate pages | Quarterly | Any federal or significant state policy change |
| Electrical figures (breaker, wire, GFCI) | Each NEC cycle | A code revision affecting EVSE |
| NACS / J3400 connector coverage | Semi-annually | Any manufacturer changing its native connector |
| The flagship Level 2 roundup | Twice yearly | — |
Every page displays its own "Last verified" date. That date moves when we actually re-check the figures, and dateModified in our structured data moves only when the content actually changes. Refreshing a date without changing anything is a trust violation and we do not do it.
7. The price layer, and why it expires on its own
Prices come from Amazon's live data and nowhere else. There is no field in our content model where a price could be typed, which is deliberate — it means nobody can accidentally commit one.
The layer also has a 48-hour freshness gate. If the price data stops being refreshed, every number on the site disappears and every button falls back to "check price on Amazon". We chose that over the alternative deliberately: the failure mode is silence rather than a stale claim, and a reader who sees no number has lost nothing while a reader who sees a wrong one has been misled.
8. Corrections
If a figure here is wrong, we want to know, and a link to the primary source is the most useful thing you can send. We correct factual errors and add a visible, dated correction note rather than editing silently. The full commitment is in our editorial policy; the address is on our contact page.