Smart Home Energy About
The Tariff Checker
The Smart Home Energy Tariff Checker is built for homeowners with electric vehicles, electric heating, or heat pumps — to help you find out, in under 90 seconds, whether you could save money on a time-of-use (ToU) tariff.
Most switching sites won't show you these tariffs. ToU tariffs are harder to model than standard single-rate deals — savings depend on whenyou use electricity, not just how much, and that varies hugely depending on your car, your heating system, when you charge, and how your home runs. Most aggregators have decided it's not worth the effort.
We disagreed. The households with the most to gain from switching — sometimes £200 to £600 a year — are exactly the ones being underserved. So we built the Tariff Checker to fill that gap.
We're independent
Smart Home Energy is completely independent of every energy supplier. We're not owned by one, funded by one, or steered by one.
We also don't make money from most of the recommendations we give. When we do earn a commission — for example, when a switch helps cover our running costs — we say so clearly. You can read exactly how we make money.
Our mission is straightforward: help UK households save money on their energy bills, and help cut UK carbon emissions while doing it.
Our story
Smart Home Energy was founded in 2010 by Oliver Sylvester-Bradley to provide independent news, views and reviews about smart home energy-saving products and technology — to help people save money and cut carbon.
We exist to help homeowners understand and choose the best energy-saving products and smart home gadgets for their setup. Our vision is a world with a stable atmosphere, in which everyone has access to clean, affordable energy — and fuel poverty is history.
About Oliver
Oliver has spent two decades working in renewable energy.
From 2005 to 2011 he worked at Solarcentury, where he ran the We Support Solarcampaign — the public push that led to the introduction of the UK's feed-in tariff, the policy that kicked off Britain's domestic solar boom.
He went on to work with SolarAid, helping bring solar light and power to off-grid communities across Africa. Since then he's consulted for renewable energy companies including Chelsfield Solar, Evo Energy, Footprint Zero, Ineco and Wise Energy.
Most recently, Oliver spent seven years at Vattenfall IDNO, helping grow the company from a startup until it was acquired by Eclipse — a subsidiary of Octopus Energy — in 2026.
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