Editorial standards

Who publishes this

Everything on this site is published by the GaugeRoute team at Ardeo Labs LLC. Authorship is organizational rather than personal: the pages carry no individual byline, and the same organization is named as author and publisher in the structured data on every page. We would rather tell you it is a company writing than attach a name that means nothing to you.

GaugeRoute is a small independent software company. It is not a fire marshal's office, a licensing board, a law firm, or a testing laboratory, and no page here will imply otherwise. The point of view is an operator's: we read the public sources, we write down what a working service company needs to know, and where the answer is a legal one we name the agency that gives it.

We record. We never certify.

This is the first rule and it shapes everything else. No page on this site states or implies that a building, a site, or a piece of equipment is compliant. The licensed operator certifies the work and the authority having jurisdiction enforces the requirement. What a page here can do is describe the requirement and name who confirms it.

That is why the whole family of stay-on-top-of-your-compliance phrasings is banned from this copy by a lint, and why the tools return dates rather than verdicts. A tool that told you a building had passed would be making a claim it has no standing to make.

What counts as a source

A primary source is a statute, an administrative rule, or a page published by the agency that administers the rule. Where a code section was read through a code-hosting mirror rather than the state's own server, the citation says so, because the text is the rule's text but the host is not the state.

A secondary source is everything else: vendor explainers, service-company articles, software-review sites, association pages that summarise rather than administer. Secondary sources are always labelled as such on the page that uses them, and they are never presented as primary.

A citation that was not fetched does not back a claim. Every source URL on this site was actually requested and read by the research pass that recorded it. A link that returned an access refusal, an unreadable document, or an empty page is recorded as a failure, and the claim it would have supported is downgraded rather than kept.

What we do when we cannot read a source

We say so. Forty-six of the fifty-one jurisdictions in the service-tag layer carry no confirmed tag rule, seventeen carry no confirmed licensing posture, and each of those pages says plainly that this research could not confirm one and names the agency to ask. That is a correct answer, not a gap waiting to be filled in.

The failure mode we are guarding against is specific and it is common in this niche: a plausible-sounding requirement, licence class, or tag specification that no source supports, written up because a page looked thin without it. Thin and true beats complete and invented, and on licensing it beats it by a wide margin, because a state page that goes stale does not merely mislead: it can tell an operator they may work without a licence.

A test in this codebase enforces it rather than trusting anyone to remember. A state page may assert a licensing requirement only if it carries a primary citation of the right kind, and the same rule now covers the service-tag field. Where a citation cannot be produced, the honest remedy is to downgrade the page, and the test will not accept the alternative.

Standards we do not quote

The NFPA standards are copyrighted consensus documents sold by their publisher. This site has not obtained the text of any of them, so it quotes none, and it reproduces no table from one.

What it does instead is cite the government regulations that state the same intervals in their own words, and name the edition a jurisdiction has adopted where that adoption record could be read. The pages say which is which. Where only vendor summaries carry a figure, the page labels it a vendor summary or leaves it out.

This is not a limitation we are apologising for. A page that names the federal section an interval comes from, and the edition your state adopted, is checkable. A page that paraphrases a paywalled table without saying so is not.

When sources disagree

We show the disagreement rather than averaging it away or picking whichever answer reads better. The fire alarm frequency page is the clearest case: two vendor sources give different answers for how often smoke detectors are functionally tested, neither cites an edition, and the page says so and explains how to settle it against the adopted edition.

Anyone who gives you one confident number there is rounding off a real dispute.

How the dates work

Pages carry a visible "Updated" line with a month and year. That date is content-stamped: it moves when the content of that page actually changes, and it does not move on a deploy. The same stamped value feeds both the line you can see and the machine-readable date a search engine reads, so the page and its markup always say the same thing.

Some pages carry a second stamp, "Reviewed", and it means a different thing on purpose: the month that page's claims were last checked against their sources. A page can be updated without being re-reviewed, and collapsing the two into one date would make one of them false.

We do not publish an original publication date. For pages that have been substantially rewritten, the honest publication date describes prose that no longer exists, and we would rather omit a field than invent one.

What we will not publish

No customer reviews, ratings, testimonials, or case studies until we have real ones from real customers who agreed to be named. There are none on this site today, and there is no aggregate rating anywhere in our structured data, because there is nothing honest to put there.

No invented author personas, no fabricated review board, and no credentials we do not hold.

No competitor named in our copy, and no claim about what another product does or does not do. What we are accountable for are the claims we make about our own.

No fear. This is a safety trade and the pages are written as reference for people who work in it, not as a scare to sell software.

Guidance, and the limits of it

Everything here is informational. It is not legal advice, and reading it creates no professional relationship with anyone.

The rules that govern this trade are layered in a way no single page can resolve: a federal regulation, a state's adopted edition of a standard, a state licensing scheme, and a local fire marshal who may require more than the state does. Where a page touches one of those, it tells you to verify with the named agency and with your authority having jurisdiction, and that instruction is the actual advice.

How to report an error

If something here is wrong, out of date, or unsourced, write to [email protected] and name the page and the line. A correction with a link to the rule is the most useful message we can receive, and we would rather fix a page than defend it.

Corrections are made on the page itself and the updated date moves when we make them. If a correction changes what a page told you to do, we say what changed rather than editing it away quietly.