Describe the project. We will tell you what fits, what does not, and exactly why.

Three dimensions, never folded together

A record can read Fit 100 · Evidence manufacturer-stated · Critical verification pending, and that is not a contradiction. It is the most useful thing we can tell you: the product suits your project on the facts we hold, and those facts rest on the maker's own word rather than an engineering document.

• Fit — how well the product matches the project, computed from the recorded product facts. Nothing about how well those facts are supported enters this number.
• Evidence — how well those facts are supported. Coverage and strength of the underlying claims, reported as a profile rather than an invented number.
• Critical verification — whether the support is sufficient for a decision that carries consequences. Verified, pending, or absent.

An earlier version of this engine discounted the fit score when evidence was weak. That was double counting, and it made a score of 89 ambiguous between slightly wrong shape and right shape, weaker paperwork. Those are different conclusions and you need to be able to tell them apart.

How the fit score is calculated

Each constraint you set carries a published weight. The score is the points earned over the points available for the constraints you actually set, so it never penalises a record for a specification you did not ask about.

Where your requirement falls inside a published range, the score is shown as a range rather than a single figure — because which end of the product's range applies to your site is settled by the engineering document, not by us.

What the verification states mean

Every figure carries one of four states. They describe how we came by the number, never how good the product is. A well-made product with no published engineering document is marked reported, and that is a fact about the documentation.

Unknown is a real state

A criterion with no recorded value earns nothing, blocks nothing, and stays in the denominator. It can never inflate a score by quietly leaving the calculation, and it is never read as evidence that the product would have failed. Where an unknown lands on a critical criterion the record is marked insufficient evidence to assess, because the honest statement is not that it scores lower but that it cannot be assessed on the thing that matters most.

Rating evidence is not a yes or no

A Miami-Dade Notice of Acceptance belongs to the High-Velocity Hurricane Zone. It is explicitly not a statewide Florida approval on its own, and outside Florida it functions as a general engineering evaluation subject to local acceptance. It runs five years from issue, carries a separate building-code expiration date, and is valid only up to the maximum size tested — a model certified at 10 by 13 feet is not certified at 20 by 20, even in the same product line.

So when a brand says certified, the useful reply is: give me the number. Then check its dates, its code edition, and the sizes on it. The absence of a certificate does not block a permit either — a technical evaluation report from a licensed engineer, a rational analysis under FBC 1604.4, or the local product approval route all exist.

The evidence layer behind this page is published at /data/pergola.json. The interpretation is here; the underlying records are there, so the work can be checked rather than trusted.