About Top Tested Picks
Ten people, ten very different homes across the US, and one simple rule: we live with a product for weeks before we tell you anything about it.
How this site started
It started with a blender in Columbus, Ohio. Tammy Rademacher had bought one that topped three different "best blenders" lists, all with the same photo, the same five bullet points and the same breathless verdict. Eleven days later the jar cracked along the base while she was making a smoothie for two hungry toddlers. She sent a photo to a group chat with a few friends and wrote one line: "Did anyone who wrote these lists ever make a single smoothie?"
Dale Kowalczyk answered first. He had spent 19 years driving a van full of spare parts to people's kitchens around Toledo, and he had a whole mental list of "top rated" products he'd seen die in the first year. Brenda Vukovich chimed in about a suitcase whose wheel had cracked on its second flight. Within a week the chat had a new name and a shared spreadsheet with one column that mattered: what went wrong, and when.
That spreadsheet turned into this site. The idea was never to be first with a review. It was to be the review you read after you've been burned once and you don't want it to happen again.
"In 19 years of repairs I learned that the box never tells you how a thing breaks. The only way to find out is to use it until it does." Dale Kowalczyk
What we're here to do
Our mission fits on a sticky note: help you buy it once. That means telling you which product is worth your money, and just as often, which one isn't. It means writing down the annoying stuff a spec sheet leaves out, like the air fryer basket that won't fit in a normal dishwasher rack, or the robot vacuum that gives up at a 0.8-inch kitchen threshold.
It also means writing for your life, not a lab. Most of us don't live in a white room with perfect Wi-Fi. We have dogs that shed, kids who spill, old houses with uneven floors and flights that board late. So that's where we test.
How a test is born
Every test on this site begins with a question from a real person. Sometimes it's a reader email. Sometimes it's one of us standing in a store aisle, confused by eight models that look identical. And then we turn that question into a single sentence we call the primary goal.
For cordless stick vacuums, for example, the goal was: which one cleans a whole 3-bedroom home, carpet and pet hair included, on a single charge. That one sentence decides the winner. Everything else, from the color of the dock to the number of attachments, is a tiebreaker. You can see the primary goal of every test we're running right now on our tests in progress page.
From there the path is always the same. We build a shortlist, we buy the products at normal retail prices, and the tester who fits the question best lives with them for three to eight weeks. When the test is over we compare the results against the goal, write it up and publish it in our reviews. The full process, with scoring sheets and weights, is on our how we test page.
Tested in American homes
Every one of our ten testers lives in the US, from a 1970s ranch house in Toledo to a duplex in Milwaukee and a house in Knoxville with two rescue dogs. We buy the version sold here, with the US plug and the 120-volt motor, from US stores like Target, Best Buy, Walmart, Costco and Home Depot, and every price you see is in dollars at the time of writing. Mattresses and bedding are tested in US sizes, grills on backyard patios from Kansas City to Harrisburg, and we measure in inches, pounds and degrees Fahrenheit.
If a product isn't sold in the US, or the US version differs from the one sold abroad, we say so on the page instead of pointing you toward something you can't buy.
One more thing worth knowing: the company that publishes the site, Leadforecom S.r.l., is based in Turin, Italy. The testing and the writing happen here, in the homes of the ten people below.
The people behind every review
No pen names, no stock photos. These are the ten people, all living in the US, who use the products and sign the reviews.
Mom of two, owner of a kitchen that gets destroyed daily. If it survives her Tuesday, it survives anything.
Fixed appliances for 19 years. Opens things up to see how they are built, then tells you how long they will last.
71 flights last year with one carry-on. Tests phones, earbuds and anything with a battery.
Reads the ingredient list before the marketing. Tests smart rings, wellness and grooming gear.
Grills year round, even in January. Owns more thermometers than anyone should.
Checks every health and recovery claim against what he sees in his clinic every week.
Two rescue dogs, one grumpy tabby, Sunday grandkids and a sofa that has seen things. Tests every feeder, camera and brush on them first.
Former night-shift nurse who spent 22 years sleeping in daylight. Tests mattresses, cooling gear and anything that promises better nights.
Drove a truck for 26 years, now spends half the year on the road in a camper. Tests luggage, e-readers and travel gear the hard way.
Volunteer firefighter and the neighbor everyone borrows tools from. Grills, mowers and anything that runs on propane or a battery pack.
Meet the testers
Tammy Rademacher, home and kitchen
Tammy cooks for a family of four in Columbus, Ohio, on weeknights that start at 5:40 p.m. and end whenever the toddlers agree to sleep. She lives with her husband Josh and their two small kids in a house where the kitchen gets destroyed daily and the counter space is always one appliance short.
She tests anything that lives on a kitchen counter. Her standard is simple: if it can't handle a Tuesday night with two kids, a sink full of dishes and one parent, it doesn't get a recommendation. Her reviews of the Thermomix TM7 and the Ninja DualZone air fryer are some of the most read pages on the site.
Dale Kowalczyk, appliances and cleaning
Dale fixed vacuums, dishwashers and just about everything else with a motor for 19 years before he retired from repair work and started breaking things on purpose for us. He knows where cheap products fail because he spent two decades cutting hair off brush rolls with a seam ripper.
He tests at home in a 1970s ranch house of 1,640 square feet with oak floors, carpeted stairs, five different door thresholds and a golden retriever mix called Rusty who sheds all year round. His wife Carol is the quiet second opinion on every test, and his granddaughter Maddie provides the spills. Dale measures every threshold with a caliper before a robot vacuum is allowed in, and he never fully trusts a product until he's looked inside it.
Brenda Vukovich, tech and travel
Brenda took 71 flights in the last twelve months, mostly domestic, a handful to Europe and one very long one to Singapore. She packs for five days in a single carry-on and has weighed her gear on the same luggage scale for five years. If a phone, a pair of earbuds or a power bank claims a battery life, Brenda is the one who checks it at 36,000 feet.
At home in Chicago she lives with her partner, who has strong opinions about noise cancelling and has become her unofficial second tester. She once got her 71-year-old dad to take a hearing test on a pair of earbuds, which may be the most useful thing any review on this site has ever done.
Darlene Hufnagel, health and beauty
Darlene is our health and beauty editor. She spent fifteen years with a $60 hair dryer, a round brush and a flat iron before she started testing multistylers for a living, so she knows the difference between a tool that saves time and one that just looks good on a shelf. She lives in a Milwaukee duplex with her husband Tom and their cat Pepper, who has sat in on every hair dryer test and hated all of them equally.
She covers smart rings, grooming gear, massage guns and LED masks. Darlene reads the actual study behind a claim before she reads the marketing, and she usually wears a sleep tracker for 60 days before she'll say anything about its accuracy.
Randall Plunkett, outdoor, grills and fitness
Randall has cooked on gas and charcoal in his Kansas City backyard for twenty years, and he owns more thermometers than anyone should. He lives with his wife Tanya, their 12-year-old son, their 9-year-old daughter and a hound mix called Rosie who has a real gift for waiting next to a smoker. When the family cooks for a crowd, it's usually a whole soccer team after a Saturday tournament.
He also runs, which is why he tests fitness watches with a chest strap under his shirt. His last watch test covered 47 runs and 312 miles. He runs hot, admits it, and has a beard that turns every electric trimmer test into a stress test.
Gary Szymanski, physiotherapist
Gary spent fourteen years at an outpatient clinic in Pittsburgh, and he still sees regular clients there. He's the person who stops the rest of us from getting excited about a health claim that doesn't hold up. When we test posture correctors, massage guns or mattress toppers, Gary writes the protocol, checks the data every couple of weeks and tells us what he'd say to a real patient.
He plays soccer on weekends, which means he tests recovery tools on sore legs he actually earned. His favorite line in any test meeting is "that's five people, not a clinical trial," and he's usually right to say it.
Sheila Tuttle, pets
Sheila shares a house in Knoxville, Tennessee, with her husband Earl, two rescue dogs and one grumpy tabby. Waffles is a three-year-old terrier mix who treats the mail carrier as a personal enemy, Duke is an old beagle mix who sleeps through everything, and Biscuit is an 11-pound tabby who has decided breakfast is at 5 a.m. Her office calls her in three days a week, which is how the house ended up testing dog cameras and automatic feeders in the first place.
She tests feeders, cameras, brushes and anything else that promises to make life with pets easier, and every product meets the animals before it meets a notebook. Her rule: if Biscuit can outsmart it in a week, it doesn't get a recommendation. The grandkids visit most Sundays and count as a stress test of their own.
Rhonda Mankowski, sleep
Rhonda worked 22 years as a night-shift nurse in Buffalo, New York, which means she spent two decades trying to sleep at noon behind foil-covered windows. She knows what a bad night costs, and she knows it better than any sleep tracker does. Since she retired from nights she finally sleeps next to her husband Sam, who runs hot, while she sleeps in wool socks in July.
She tests mattresses, cooling gear, pillows and anything that promises better nights. She logs every night by hand before she opens an app, and she won't write a word about a sleep product until she has at least 30 nights on it. Her 45-night test on why heat wakes you at 3 a.m. and her Eight Sleep Pod 5 review are two of the most read pages on the site.
Wayne Bocook, travel
Wayne drove a truck for 26 years, and he still can't sit still. These days he and his wife Deb spend half the year on the road in a camper and the other half in Lexington, Kentucky, where almost every flight means a connection in Charlotte or Atlanta. After a quarter century in a truck cab, he knows exactly how much stuff fits in a small space and what breaks first.
He tests luggage, e-readers and travel gear the hard way: real trips, a steel tape, the same old luggage scale and a written log after every leg. He owns 212 paperbacks and swears he'll never get rid of a single one, which made his Kindle test more honest than most.
Rodney Frankenfield, grills and yard
Rodney is a volunteer firefighter in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and the neighbor everyone borrows tools from. He lives with his wife Janet and their two teenage sons, who eat like a fire crew after a long call, so every grill he tests gets a real workload from the first week.
He covers gas grills, mowers and anything that runs on propane or a battery pack. He checks the grease tray and the gas line before he checks the sear marks, because he has seen what a neglected grill can do. His neighbors know that when Rodney is testing something, there will be leftovers.
How we make money and stay independent
We earn money through affiliate commissions. When you click a link on our site and buy something, the store may pay us a small fee. You pay exactly the same price. That's how we cover the cost of buying every product we test, the measuring tools and the time our testers spend with them.
The good part is that this model only works if you trust us. A review that sends you to the wrong product gets returned, and returns cancel commissions. So the fastest way for us to lose money is to recommend something that doesn't hold up. The full details are in our affiliate disclosure.
Corrections and updates
We get things wrong sometimes. A price changes, a firmware update fixes a bug we complained about, or a reader spots a number we mistyped. When that happens we fix the page, update the date at the top and, when the change affects the verdict, add a short note explaining what changed and why.
We also go back to our reviews on a schedule. Products that stay popular get a second look at around six months, because that's when batteries, filters and hinges start telling the truth. More than one verdict on this site has changed after a follow-up, and we'd rather tell you than pretend the first test was the last word.
Talk to us
Spotted a mistake, want us to test something, or just have a question about a product you're eyeing? Write to editorial@toptestedpicks.com. A real person from the team reads every message, usually within two working days. You'll find more on what to include on our contact page.
And if you're wondering what's on the bench right now, the tests in progress page shows every product we're living with this month, and who's testing it.