I’m Adrian. This site is one person reading source material and writing down what it actually says.

Why it exists

I went looking for a straight answer about my own water and couldn’t find one.

What I found instead was two kinds of website. The first told me my house was full of poison and that the solution was a $60 supplement. The second told me not to worry about anything, usually in a tone suggesting anyone who did worry was being silly. Neither was much use, because the real picture is that some of this matters a great deal and some of it is nonsense, and nobody seemed willing to sort one from the other.

The sorting is the whole job. Lead has no safe level in children. Radon causes tens of thousands of lung cancer deaths a year. Cooking fills your kitchen with fine particles. All true, all well documented, all boring enough that the wellness industry largely ignores them in favour of things that photograph better.

Meanwhile the products with the loudest marketing — the foot pads, the footbaths, the cleanses — do nothing. Some of them cause real harm. And they sell precisely because the underlying worry is legitimate. That’s the part that bothers me most: people with an entirely reasonable concern getting sold an answer that doesn’t address it.

What I’m not

Not a doctor, a toxicologist, an industrial hygienist, or a researcher. I have no credential in any of this.

What I do is read primary sources — government agencies, peer-reviewed papers, standards bodies — and write down what they say, including when what they say is “we don’t know yet.” Everything here stands on the sources it cites, which is why they’re linked on every page. Where I’m uncertain, the page says so. Where I’m wrong, I’d like to be told.

How it’s funded

Affiliate commissions and display advertising. That creates an obvious incentive to tell you to buy things, and the How I Test page sets out in detail what I do to counteract it — including the fact that the highest-commission category on this site is ranked last and described as the one that matters least.

A good proportion of the advice here costs nothing. Those pages earn nothing too. They’re the ones I’d most like you to read.

Start here

If you’re new, the overview is the place to begin. It sorts the whole subject into what’s established, what’s genuinely uncertain, and what’s being sold to you that doesn’t work.

Or take the room-by-room checklist and work through your house at whatever pace suits you.