Sources and update log

2026-09-24 — content pass: worked examples, price drivers, quote reading, when not to install, regional factors

Added six pages: two households run end to end through the calculators (worked examples), what moves an installed quote (price drivers), how to check a quote against the scope tool (how to read a quote), when a pump is the wrong fix (when not to install), what genuinely varies by place (regional factors), and this page.

No new priced figure was added to this site's records in this pass. This site's standing rule (see the refusal list on methodology) is that a figure is published only after a live or archived verification with a stored quote — never from memory or from a summary of what a source is believed to say. Two data series identified while writing this pass have not cleared that bar, so neither is published; both are logged below as open items rather than guessed at. The new pages were built entirely from the 14 figures already on file, run through this site's own calculators.

2026-08-24 — three provenance defects corrected in one pass

A review of every page that cites a source found three defects in how this site had been presenting its own evidence, all corrected the same day:

• A fabricated USGS quote. The roof-example figure had been carrying a sentence this site wrote itself — "a roof of '40 x 70 feet' yields '1,743' gallons... from a 1-inch rainstorm" — inside quotation marks attributed to the agency. Every number in it was correct, but the sentence was ours, not USGS's, and quoting our own prose as a federal agency's words is a false attribution regardless of whether the numbers check out. It now carries the actual table row verbatim, with the reading of it moved outside the quotation.
• A false "live" access claim. The USGS water-density figure (8.329 lb per gallon at 70F) was marked as quoting text present on the live page, but the sentence had since been removed from it. The access state was corrected to "archived", with three independent capture dates recorded as evidence the quote was genuinely published at that URL. The value did not change; the honesty of the access claim did.
• A reconstructed EIA quote. The electricity-rate figure's quote had the table's title with a cell reading ("— residential, May 2026: 18.44") appended to it — a reconstruction, not an excerpt, rendered inside a blockquote as if EIA had written that whole sentence. It now carries only the table's own title, as read on the 2026-08-24 retrieval, with the cell reading moved to an unquoted note. That title carries a rolling end-date and will not match a live check made after that date without a fresh retrieval. The rate itself — 18.44 cents per kilowatt-hour — did not change in this correction; only the quote's honesty did.

The same day, the National Weather Service's own description of the Precipitation Frequency Data Server was quoted on the pit inflow test page, so a reader knows what they are being sent to before following the link.

2026-08-06 — sizing-first rebuild

The site was rebuilt around measured geometry rather than a national cost anchor. The USGS rainfall conversion (27,154 gal per acre-inch), the EPA's sanitary-sewer-overflow guidance on inappropriate connections, and the full set of derived unit conversions and labeled assumptions in the current registry were established on this date. The three defects corrected on 2026-08-24 above were introduced on this date and stood uncorrected for eighteen days before the review that caught them.