Our Method

1. What we are

An affiliate publication. We earn a commission when you buy through our links, and that is the entire business model. It is disclosed above the first affiliate link on every commercial page and stated in full on the disclosure page.

2. What we do not do

• Test units. We have not used any of these machines.
• Accept free products, review samples or loans.
• Take sponsored placements or paid rankings of any kind.
• Publish reviews, ratings or testimonials sourced from anywhere else.
• Fill a missing specification with a figure from a similar model.

3. How picks are made

Four criteria, weighted in this order. They apply to every roundup on the site.

1. Documentation quality. Whether the manufacturer publishes a specification table you can check. A machine you can look up beats a machine you cannot, and it is the only quality signal available to us that does not require owning the product.
2. Published output. Pounds per day, and pounds per hour where anyone publishes it, which is currently only GE.
3. Running cost, computed from the best electrical figure the manufacturer publishes, and labeled with which kind of figure it was.
4. Practical fit. Bin capacity, footprint, clearance, height, weight. The things that decide whether a machine works in your kitchen.

Deliberately excluded: noise, build quality, taste and reliability. We have nothing honest to say about any of them, and repeating other people's impressions would be laundering their claims through our page.

Every product entry also carries a required reason to skip it. That field is mandatory in the data model — an entry without one does not compile — because a recommendation with no downside is an advertisement.

4. Where every specification comes from

Every value on this site links to its source and shows the date we read it. Specifications change silently, so a citation without a date is a citation you cannot check.

5. The running-cost method, in full

This is the part most worth checking, because it is where a number can most easily be dressed up as a fact.

The two kinds of electrical figure

• A published power consumption, in watts. What the machine uses. Frigidaire and NewAir publish these. When we have one, the resulting cost is close to real.
• A nameplate rating, in volts and amps. Their product is volt-amps, which is the maximum the appliance may draw, used for sizing circuits. It is not consumption: a cycling compressor appliance draws less while running and nothing while idle. GE publishes only these. When it is all we have, the cost figure is an upper bound and we label it one.

The formula

The inputs

• Wattage: the manufacturer's published consumption where it exists, otherwise volts × amps from the nameplate. The page always says which.
• Duty cycle: 4 running hours a day, labeled as an assumption because that is what it is. We do not know your household and we will not pretend to. A full range is published alongside, and the calculator takes your own figure.
• Electricity rate: $0.18/kWh, rounded from the EIA's Electric Power Monthly, Table 5.6.A: 18.34 cents per kWh, US residential average, June 2026. Re-checked twice a year.

Presentation rules

• The column is headed Max $/mo, never 'cost to run'. The label carries the honesty.
• Never a bare dollar figure. The inputs and the arithmetic are always adjacent or one click away.
• 'Not published' where a manufacturer gives no electrical rating. Never derived from a similar model.
• Never a claim of measurement. We do not own a watt meter and we have not metered anything.

The full worked version, with every machine and a calculator, is on what a nugget ice maker costs to run.

6. What we do when sources disagree

1. Publish both, each with its source and the date we read it.
2. Name the discrepancy explicitly on the page rather than resolving it silently.
3. Prefer the manufacturer's own support documentation or manual over a retail listing.
4. State the limitation honestly, including when we cannot tell which figure applies.

There is a live example running through this site. GE publishes 24 lbs a day on its Opal support page and 38 lbs a day in the Opal 2.0 manual. We publish both, and we can show that the support page's figures match the 2017 first-generation manual line for line, which is the likeliest explanation. That is on Opal versus Opal 2.0.

7. What "Not published" means

That the manufacturer does not publish the figure and we did not substitute one. It is not a gap in our research and it is not a placeholder.

It appears often, and the pattern is itself information: GE, Frigidaire and NewAir publish specification tables, while Euhomy, ecozy and KBice publish manuals with no specification section at all. Nobody in the category publishes a decibel rating or a warranty term.

8. Prices

Prices on this site come from a live data layer with a freshness gate: anything older than 48 hours is suppressed and the page falls back to "Check price on Amazon" rather than showing a stale number. There is no other price source, and no price is ever typed into a page by hand.

Product identifiers are subject to the same rule. Where a product could not be resolved to a verified retailer listing, its buy link is a search rather than a fabricated product URL.

9. Who writes this

Scooter M.. Scooter M. is an enthusiast who's genuinely into this. I read the manuals, compile the published specs, and do the math. No lab coat.

No credentials are claimed because none are held. Every byline on this site links here, which is the point: the claim being made is about method, not about the person.

10. Corrections and update cadence

The Updated date on a page changes only when the content actually changed. Bumping a year with no revision is a practice we found on competitor pages and it is one of the reasons this site publishes a method at all.

Found an error? info@nuggetreport.com. Material corrections are noted at the foot of the affected page with the date and what changed.