Editorial Methodology

TechFuel HQ publishes hardware guides for homelabbers and budget-PC builders. This page describes — in plain language — who produces the content, how it is produced, what is and is not verified first-hand, and how readers can challenge any claim made on the site. The intent is to make every article auditable.

Who produces the content

The site is owned and edited by Lowell K. Wood IV (byline LK Wood IV), based in St. Louis County, Missouri. Lowell is the publisher of record. Author identity and contact information are exposed in the JSON-LD schema on every article and in the About page.

Email: hello@techfuelhq.com

There is no other staff. The site is a single-operator publication.

AI-assisted drafting with human review

Articles on TechFuel HQ are produced under a hybrid workflow. AI tools draft the body text from research notes and source material; Lowell K. Wood IV reviews each draft for accuracy, tone, and policy compliance before publish. This is disclosed on every article in the Evidence Ledger block at the bottom of the page, and it is disclosed again in the JSON-LD schema metadata.

What this means in practice:

• AI tools are used to organize sources, draft prose, and structure tables.
• A human editor reads every draft, replaces hedge words with concrete claims where the source supports it, removes claims the source does not support, and signs off on publish.
• AI is not used to invent benchmarks, prices, version numbers, dates, or quotes. Any datapoint in an article either comes from a linked vendor / press / community source, or from a verifiable artifact produced by the site author (see below).

The site treats AI assistance as a research and drafting tool, not as an authority. Authority comes from the linked source or from the artifact slot.

Real-artifact policy

A small number of claims on the site rely on first-person evidence rather than vendor specs — for example, a Kill-A-Watt idle-wattage reading, an iperf3 throughput run between two specific NICs, a photo of a parts receipt, or a screenshot of a BIOS configuration. The site has a strict policy for these:

• A first-person hardware claim (“I measured…”, “in my rack…”, “on my own bench…”) is allowed only when the article shows the underlying artifact: a photo, a receipt, a measurement screenshot, or a captured terminal output.
• Articles that need such a claim but do not yet have the artifact in hand carry an internal placeholder marker in the markdown source until the artifact is supplied. The marker describes the missing measurement and is hidden from the rendered page; the operator and the build pipeline track them so the artifact is filled before the article ships final.
• Fabricating an artifact — staged screenshots, made-up wattage numbers, invented dmesg or journalctl output, fake receipts — is forbidden under site policy and would be a firing offense for any contributor.

If an article’s evidence shifts from “vendor spec citation” to “first-person measurement”, the Evidence Ledger update log records the date the artifact was added.

Source standards

Every factual claim that is not first-person traces to one of these:

• Vendor documentation — release notes, specification sheets, official pricing pages, official product matrices.
• Vendor announcements — release blogs, press notes, official forums.
• Reputable third-party publications — ServeTheHome, Tom’s Hardware, AnandTech archive, Phoronix, LWN, vendor-independent benchmark labs. Forum posts and community wikis are used only for facts that have a clear authoritative provenance (release notes, license docs, official FAQs).
• Standards bodies — JEDEC, PCI-SIG, IEEE, RFC documents, where relevant.

Sources are linked inline at the point of claim and aggregated in the Sources block within each article and in the Evidence Ledger.

A claim that cannot be cited to a resolvable, real source is removed before publish. Articles do not carry uncited “rumor” or “in my experience” lines that lack an artifact.

Affiliate and monetization disclosure

The site participates in affiliate programs (Amazon Associates and similar retailer programs, where applicable). Every article that contains an affiliate link displays a clear disclosure block near the top of the article. The full affiliate policy is on the Disclosure page.

Affiliate revenue does not influence which products are recommended. If a product is not the right pick for the use case, it does not get recommended — affiliate link or not.

The site participates in Google AdSense for display advertising. Advertising never appears inside the body of an article in a way that disrupts reading flow, and editorial recommendations are made independently of advertiser identity.

Update cadence

Articles are revised when the underlying facts change — a new product release, a vendor price shift, a license-policy change, a new firmware or kernel that affects compatibility. Each article carries a “Last updated” date in the Evidence Ledger that reflects the most recent material revision. Cosmetic edits (typos, layout fixes) do not bump that date.

A site-level update log lives in this branch’s commit history and the Evidence Ledger on each article.

Corrections

Readers who spot an error are encouraged to email hello@techfuelhq.com with the article URL and the specific section in question. Confirmed corrections are:

1. Made in-place in the affected article.
2. Logged in the article’s Evidence Ledger update log with the date and a one-line summary.
3. Acknowledged by reply email.

Material errors discovered after the fact are not silently overwritten. The site’s intent is to be auditable; that requires keeping a record of what changed and when.

What this site does not do

To set explicit expectations:

• The site does not publish vendor-paid placements disguised as editorial.
• The site does not publish “review” content for products the author has not handled and for which no first-person artifact is shown — vendor-spec comparisons are framed as such, not as hands-on reviews.
• The site does not chase hype cycles. If a product is unproven, the article says so.
• The site does not present AI-drafted text as if it were unaided expert opinion. The AI-assisted disclosure is permanent and visible.

Contact

Publisher: Lowell K. Wood IV Email: hello@techfuelhq.com Location: St. Louis County, Missouri, United States

Site policies referenced from this page: About, Disclosure, Privacy, Terms, Contact.