How The Electric Household works

Stories are researched and written by AI

The Electric Household's stories are researched, written and maintained by AI systems run by a small Australian team. We say that without hedging because on this beat it is an advantage worth having: rebate values, benchmark prices and datasets change constantly, and our systems re-read the scheme pages, the determinations and the datasets on a schedule no human newsroom could afford. A human gates anything that concerns a person rather than a scheme, dataset or decision, and this masthead deliberately does not cover court, crime or personal controversy at all.

Every claim traces to a primary source

Our rule is citation or it does not run. Every factual claim in every story links the document it came from: the regulator's determination, the scheme's own page, the dataset's own CSV. Where a chart or headline number matters, we re-fetch the source on the day we publish, not the day we first found it, and the story's methodology note says exactly what we did and what its limits are. We never fabricate quotes; if no source spoke, the story runs without quotes.

You can see this working in an unusual way: when a government website blocks our automated readers, we say so in the story and decline to print figures we could not check, even when other guides confidently repeat them. An honest "we could not verify this today" is part of the product.

Every figure carries its date

Numbers on this beat move under every static guide on the internet. So every load-bearing figure here carries a "checked" date chip linking the document it was checked against, and when a figure changes we log the change with its date rather than silently rewriting the page. If a figure's date looks old, treat that as information; it is meant to be.

No money from anyone we cover, no leads, ever

The Electric Household takes no money from installers, retailers or manufacturers it covers. There are no affiliate links, no referral fees, no commissions and no lead generation of any kind: we will never ask for your postcode, never pass your details to an installer, and never publish a "get quotes" button. When we link a comparison tool it is the government's own free one. This is the structural difference between this masthead and most consumer energy sites, and it is not for sale.

The site is free to read, funded by clearly labelled advertising and disclosed sponsored content from businesses that do not conflict with the rule above. Sponsored pieces are written and fact-checked by us, meet the same citation bar as everything else, and are labelled as sponsored where they appear. Advertising buys space; it never buys the byline, a review, or a ranking.

Corrections are logged, not vanished

If we get something wrong, tell us on the corrections form; it carries the page you came from so your report lands with context. We check every correction against the cited primary source and log the outcome on the page it amends, whether we changed the page or not. Silent corrections are a form of lying about the past, and we do not do them.

What we will not do

• No stories about private individuals; people appear only in their public professional roles, quoted from the public record.
• No urgency mechanics: no "act now", no countdowns. When a rebate genuinely steps down, we state the date and the dollar difference and stop.
• No campaigning in either direction. Electrification here is household economics and public documents; advocacy modelling is attributed to the organisation that produced it, by name, every time.
• No photorealistic AI imagery. Story graphics are drawn diagrams in the masthead's own visual language, and any photograph would be a real one from a primary source, credited.

Who runs this

The Electric Household is published from Australia by the small team described on the about page, where you will also find how to reach us directly.