Privacy policy

Last updated: 9 June 2026

This policy explains what personal data Smart Home Energy collects when you use our Home Energy Plan service, how we use it, who we share it with, how long we keep it, and the rights you have over it.

Smart Home Energy is a home energy advice service. We compare electricity tariffs, build you a personalised home energy plan using AI, check which energy grants you might be eligible for, and recommend products and tariffs that could cut your bills or carbon. Some of this involves data we treat with extra care — including details about benefits you receive — and this policy is honest about all of it.

Who we are

Smart Home Energy is a trading name of OLISB Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales.

For any privacy question, to exercise your rights under UK GDPR, or to request that we delete your data, email us at info@smarthomeenergy.co.uk.

We are the data controller for your personal data under UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018. We are registered with the Information Commissioner's Office under registration number ZC131908.

What data we collect

When you use the tariff comparison

To give you a tariff recommendation, we ask for information about your home and energy use. This includes:

• Your postcode
• Your current electricity supplier and tariff
• Your current unit rate(s) and standing charge
• Whether you have an electric vehicle, heat pump, solar panels, or a home battery — and details about each if so
• Driving mileage, home size, insulation quality, and similar profile information

Your address and EPC certificate

To find your home and tailor your plan, we ask for your address. When you give it, we look your property up in the publicly available Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) register and, if we find a match, store the matched record. That record can include:

• Address line 1 and 2, and full postcode
• The property's UPRN (Unique Property Reference Number) and EPC certificate number
• EPC rating and SAP energy-efficiency scores, the certificate date, and the official improvement recommendations on the certificate

The underlying EPC data comes from the Government's EPC Open Data register. We hold the copy matched to your home so you don't have to type it all in.

Details about your home

So your plan reflects your actual property, we collect home details you tell us, such as:

• Property type, age, and number of bedrooms
• Fabric and condition — walls, loft, floor, windows, ventilation, and whether there's any damp
• Heating system and its age, and whether you have thermostatic radiator valves (TRVs) or a smart thermostat
• Equipment — electric vehicle, heat pump, solar panels, home battery
• Occupancy (how many people live there and when the home is occupied) and outdoor space

Your notes and questions

You can write free-text notes and questions about your home (for example “the back bedroom is always cold”). We store this text and pass it, word for word, to the AI that builds your plan so it can address your specific situation. Please don't include sensitive information you'd rather we didn't hold or send to our AI processor in this box.

Special category data — benefits and health

To check which energy grants you might qualify for, we ask whether anyone in your household receives certain benefits. Because telling us you receive a disability benefit can reveal information about health, this counts as special category data under Article 9 of the UK GDPR.

We collect this data only to check your eligibility for energy grants and support (for example ECO4, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, or Warm Homes schemes), and you give it to us by your explicit consent — the Article 9 condition we rely on. We protect it as follows:

• It is stored in a separate, dedicated database table with stricter access controls — only your own account can read it.
• It is encrypted at rest.
• It is never sent to our AI and never shared with any third party. When we build your plan, only a derived, non-identifying eligibility result (the names of schemes you may qualify for) is used — never the underlying benefit or health details.

When you sign up

Entering your email at the sign-up gate creates your account and opens your dashboard — it's a single step. At that point we collect:

• Your email address
• Your consent to send you your plan and to alert you when a better tariff becomes available, with a timestamp and a record of the exact wording you agreed to

Your account stores your home energy plan and dashboard so you can come back to them. The home details above — plus your answers to the “Your home's details” questions that quietly improve your plan — are linked to your account, identified by your email address.

How we use AI to build your plan

We use Anthropic's Claude AI to generate your personalised home energy plan and the summary you see when you first land. Anthropic processes this data solely on our behalf under a data processing agreement. To do this we send Claude a profile of your home with personal identifiers removed, together with any free-text notes and questions you wrote.

We do not send Claude your full address, email address, UPRN, EPC certificate number, smart-meter identifiers, or any of your benefits or health data. Your savings figures and eligibility are calculated by our own software, not the AI — the AI selects, orders, and explains; it does not compute your numbers or decide your grant eligibility.

Technical data

When you visit the site, we collect standard technical data needed to run a web service: IP address, browser user-agent string, and page interactions via Vercel Analytics. Vercel Analytics is cookieless: no analytics cookies are placed on your device, IP addresses are truncated server-side, and no cross-site identifiers are stored. We also keep our own simple count of page views in our database, tied to a short-lived random tab identifier held in your browser's session storage (not a cookie, and cleared when you close the tab). That's why we don't show a cookie banner.

We do not use third-party advertising cookies, retargeting pixels, or behavioural profiling.

If you connect your Octopus account or upload a half-hourly usage file

If you choose to paste your Octopus API key to get exact rates, we use it once to read your current tariff and your half-hourly consumption. We do not store your API key after that.

When you submit your email and we create your account, we store the half-hourly consumption we read (and the meter account number it came from) so we can keep your dashboard and plan accurate when you return, regenerate them as tariffs change, and give you usage-based coaching. It's held in a separate, strict-access store, is never sent to any third party (including Anthropic), and is deleted after 12 months — or sooner if you delete your account or withdraw consent. The same applies if you upload a half-hourly usage file instead of connecting.

If you upload a bill

If you upload a PDF bill for OCR, we send it to Anthropic's Claude API to extract your unit rate and standing charge. Anthropic processes the file solely on our behalf under a data processing agreement. The bill file is deleted from our systems within 24 hours of processing.

Why we use your data

We record the timestamp, exact wording, and version of every consent you give us. You can ask us to show you this audit trail at any time.

Who we share your data with

We share your personal data only with:

• Supabase — our database provider. Data is stored on EU/UK servers.
• Vercel — our hosting provider, which also provides our cookieless analytics.
• Brevo — our transactional and marketing email provider. Receives your email address and the contents of your plan or report when we send it.
• Anthropic— we send Anthropic's Claude API a profile of your home with personal identifiers removed (plus any free-text notes you wrote) to generate your home energy plan, and, if you upload a bill, the bill file to extract the rate information. We never send Anthropic your full address, email, UPRN, certificate number, smart-meter IDs, or any benefits or health data.

We do not sell your personal data. We do not share your data with third parties for their own marketing. Your special category data (benefits and health) is never shared with any of the above. We may sell anonymised, aggregated insights (see below) — but that is no longer personal data and can never be traced back to you.

How long we keep your data

Home, EPC, and comparison data (your address, property, equipment, tariff details)

• Stored for 24 months from your last activity. After 24 months with no activity (no return visit, no click on an alert email), we delete your comparison data.
• You can delete your data at any time by emailing info@smarthomeenergy.co.uk or, if you have an account, from your account settings.

Your home energy plan and dashboard

• Each AI-generated plan is stored against your account and is automatically regenerated at least every 90 days (so it picks up updated tariffs and benchmarks). Old plan versions are replaced as they regenerate.
• Your dashboard answers (the “Your home's details” questions that refine your plan) are kept while your account is active and deleted when you delete your account.

Connected-meter and uploaded half-hourly readings

• Your half-hourly readings and the meter account they came from are kept in a separate, strict-access store for 12 months, then automatically deleted. They're removed sooner if you delete your account or withdraw your consent.

What you enter before the email step

• The details you enter before you give us your email (such as your postcode and the equipment in your home) are logged so we can understand and improve the flow. This is kept for up to 12 months, then deleted, and never includes any benefits or health information.

Special category data

• Kept in its separate, stricter-access table for as long as your account is active, so we can keep your grants eligibility up to date.
• You can withdraw your consent and have it deleted at any time — email us, and it's also removed when you delete your account.

Email address and alert subscription

• Kept for as long as you're subscribed to alerts.
• One-click unsubscribe removes you from the alert list and schedules your email address for deletion within 30 days.

Consent audit trail

• Retained for 6 yearsfrom the date of the last consent event. We're required by UK GDPR to keep this to prove you consented — and to prove when you withdrew consent.

Anonymised, aggregated data

• We create anonymised, aggregateddatasets from usage data — grouped so that no individual can be identified (e.g. “X% of EV owners in the North West are on a time-of-use tariff”). Once data is anonymised in this way it is no longer personal data, so it falls outside data protection law.
• We may keep these aggregates indefinitely, use them to improve the service, and share or sell them as market insights. They never contain your name, address, contact details, or your benefits or health information.
• Producing these aggregates is the one step that touches your personal data, and we rely on our legitimate interests to do it. You can object at any time— turn off “anonymised usage data” in your account settings and we'll leave your data out of them.

Technical logs

• Standard server logs retained for up to 90 days then deleted.

Your rights under UK GDPR

You have the following rights over your personal data:

• Access — ask us for a copy of the data we hold about you. Email us at info@smarthomeenergy.co.uk and we'll send a JSON export within one month.
• Rectification — ask us to correct anything wrong. For your saved home details, sign in to your account and update them in your dashboard; your plan regenerates with the corrected details.
• Erasure(“right to be forgotten”) — delete your account and all linked data via the Delete account button on your account page. Self-serve, immediate. (Or email us — same result, by hand.)
• Restriction — ask us to stop using your data while a concern is resolved.
• Portability— ask us for a machine-readable copy of the data you've given us.
• Objection — object to our use of your data under legitimate interests.
• Withdraw consent — at any time, for anything you consented to. The marketing-email opt-in lives on your account — flip the toggle off and we stop sending. Every marketing email also has a one-click unsubscribe link in the footer. You can also withdraw your explicit consent for us to hold your benefits and health data at any time — email us and we'll delete it. Withdrawing consent doesn't undo what we did lawfully before you withdrew it.

To exercise any right we don't yet have a self-serve flow for, email info@smarthomeenergy.co.uk. We'll respond within one month (usually much sooner).

If you're unhappy with anything we've done — data handling or otherwise — see our complaints page for how to raise it with us and how to escalate.

Cookies

We use a small number of essential cookies only — to keep you signed in if you have an account, and to remember your consent choices. These are exempt from prior-consent requirements under UK PECR, which is why we don't show a cookie banner.

International transfers

To generate your plan and read uploaded bills we use Anthropic (Claude), which operates in the US. We strip your personal identifiers first and never send benefits or health data. The transfer is covered by UK/EU Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK International Data Transfer Addendum.

Changes to this policy

If we change this policy materially, we'll update the “Last updated” date at the top and, where changes affect how we use data you've already given us, we'll email you.

Contact

For anything privacy-related: info@smarthomeenergy.co.uk.

OLISB Ltd, trading as Smart Home Energy.

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