About
Three of us run this. We are in Providence, Chattanooga and Minneapolis, and between us we have five children and a persistent interest in what is actually in the bottles under the sink.
The site exists because this category is unusually badly served. Ask which enzyme cleaner works on cat urine and you will get a forum thread from 2019, an Amazon listing with a hundred thousand reviews of unclear provenance, and a magazine roundup of five products refreshed once a year. None of them tell you what anything costs per ounce, which is the number that decides whether the expensive one is actually expensive.
So we track every product we can find, price it everywhere it is sold, work out the real cost per use, and read what people report months after buying. Then we test the ones worth testing.
How This Is Funded
Some links out to retailers may earn us a commission. That has no bearing on rankings, which are generated from price and rating data rather than written by hand, and no manufacturer pays for placement or sees anything before it publishes.
How We Score Things, 0 to 100
Every product carries an ECP score. It is calculated, not decided in a meeting, and here is exactly what goes into it.
| Component | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| What buyers report | 45% | The aggregate star rating across every retailer we can read, weighted by how many people left one. A 4.8 from forty buyers counts for far less than a 4.5 from twenty-seven thousand, and a thin rating is pulled toward the middle rather than treated as fact. |
| What people say later | 25% | The ratio of positive to negative themes in the comments we read on Reddit, where people describe how something worked months after buying it. Only counted when a brand appears at least twenty times. Below that the weight moves to the buyer rating and the page says so. |
| Value | 20% | Where the cost per ounce falls against other products of the same type and format. A gallon concentrate is only ever compared against other gallon concentrates. |
| Transparency | 10% | How widely it is stocked and how much we have been able to confirm about what is in it. |
The community reading behind the second component came from 3,983 comments across r/CleaningTips, r/CatAdvice, r/cats, r/puppy101, r/dogs, r/laundry, r/Plumbing, r/Pets, r/CATHELP and r/HomeImprovement. Each one was classified by theme, and the counts you see on a brand page are counts of real comments, not impressions.
What the score does not yet include is our own testing. Once we have run a product through the protocol on how we test, the result becomes part of it and the weights shift toward what we measured ourselves. Until then, no score on this site rests on anything we did in a room.
Scores currently run from 6 to 80, with a median of 54. Nothing has scored above 80 because nothing has been tested yet, and we would rather leave the top of the scale empty than hand it out.
What We Have Not Done Yet
We have not tested anything. We have not confirmed enzyme content against labels for most products. Sizes on many listings were read from product titles and not yet checked by hand, and those are marked as unverified wherever a per-ounce figure appears. This list will shrink and we will keep it here.