Affiliate disclosure

Some links on PoolBuff are affiliate links. If you click one and buy something, we earn a small commission. You pay exactly the same price you would have paid otherwise.

That commission funds the research and keeps the site running. It does not buy a recommendation, a ranking or an award, and no brand has ever paid us to be included in or moved up a roundup.

PoolBuff participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

We also participate in affiliate programs run by several pool equipment retailers and manufacturers. Where a link earns us a commission it is marked with rel="sponsored" in the page markup, which is the standard machine-readable way of declaring it.

Picks are chosen before commercial arrangements are considered. A product is scored against the published rubric on the page — durability, repairability, parts availability and warranty terms — and only then do we check whether a purchase link is available at all.

Several of our top picks across the site earn us nothing, because the best product in a category is not always the one with an affiliate program. Where that is the case we still recommend it, and we still link to it.

We do not accept payment for reviews, do not sell "best of" placements, do not allow brands to preview reviews, and do not remove negative coverage under commercial pressure. If a brand asks for any of those things, the answer is no and the request does not change our verdict.

We have never accepted a review sample, a loan unit or a press trip from a manufacturer or retailer. Every review guide on the site is currently from experience, not hands-on tested, and each one says so above its short answer.

If that ever changes, the arrangement will be disclosed on the article itself, the product will be assessed to the same published rubric, and we will retain full editorial control of the outcome.

Where display advertising appears, it is clearly distinguishable from editorial content and is never placed to imply endorsement of a specific product within a review.

Any sponsored content, should we ever publish it, will be labeled as such at the top of the page, excluded from our rankings, and marked with the appropriate link attributes.

We would rather answer than have you wonder. Get in touch and ask directly, or read our editorial policy and testing methodology.