Mark Ellis

How I work

Twenty years repairing appliances teaches you exactly where they fail and why, and that shapes how I evaluate everything I write about. I run products through realistic household conditions, not ideal ones, and I pay attention to the details that only show up over time: how a washing machine handles an unbalanced load after six months, whether an air conditioner holds its efficiency once the filters start clogging, how a cooktop's control panel feels after daily use. For energy testing I use a meter, not the spec sheet, and I log consumption across different settings and load sizes. When I've worked on a particular brand or model professionally I bring that service history into the review too, because knowing what breaks in year three tells you more about a product than any performance benchmark.