EcoFlex: Frequently Asked Questions
Admin and Billing
The subscription fee for EcoFlex is £13.49 per month.
It will be included in your energy bill with VAT applied at the same rate as your electricity import charges.
The subscription fee is calculated on a daily basis, which means that your monthly bill may show it as slightly higher or lower depending on how many days there are in a particular month.
There are no exit fees or charges. You’re free to switch to a different Ecotricity tariff or move to another energy supplier if you decide EcoFlex isn’t right for you.
Our customer support team is here to help. Email us at ecoflex@ecotricity.co.uk or call 0345 266 7663. We’re here Monday to Thursday 8:30am–5pm and Friday 8:30am–4pm.
The wholesale market price has two main components:
Day-ahead price – a forecasted price, set a day in advance.
Spot market price – the real-time price, which can change rapidly throughout the day.
The wholesale price calculation uses a combination of these two prices. This is to smooth out fluctuations and reduce risk by making the price more predictable.
The wholesale price also includes standard industry adjustments called distribution and loss factors. These account for the energy lost when electricity is transported from where it’s generated to your home and when you export energy back to the grid.
On your bill, all these charges are combined under energy charges (for both importing and exporting electricity).
The app shows the price you pay per unit (1 kWh) of electricity in pence. You’ll find a full breakdown of all the charges that make up this price on your bill.
In-Home Displays are designed to work with standard variable and fixed tariffs, where energy prices don’t change very often.
EcoFlex is an advanced, dynamic tariff with prices that update every 30 minutes. IHDs simply can’t keep up with this kind of real-time change.
Please use your EcoFlex app for the most accurate and up-to-date pricing.
You can find your bill in your Ecotricity online account or app.
Your EcoFlex bill includes more than just the average cost of the electricity you use. In addition to the wholesale market prices, it also covers the cost of getting that electricity safely and reliably to your home. Here's what each charge means:
Distribution Use of System (DUoS) charges - These pay for the maintenance of the local electricity network that delivers power from the grid to your home. This includes the cables, substations, maintenance and repairs in your area. You can read more about DUoS charges here.
Transmission Network Use of System (TNUoS) charges - These cover the cost of the national electricity transmission network. This is the high-voltage network that carries electricity long distances across the country. These charges help to fund the infrastructure that keeps electricity flowing wherever it's needed.
Standing charges - These are charges that you pay regardless of how much electricity you use. They help to cover essential services such as:
Maintaining your energy supply connection
Metering and billing
Industry and regulatory costs.
You’ll normally see a single consolidated standing charge on your bill if you have a fixed or variable tariff. EcoFlex is different – your bill will show you all the different elements that make up the total standing charge, so you have full visibility on all your costs.
You can reset your password in the EcoFlex app by clicking Forgot password on the login screen.
SmartShift Battery Automation
There are times when SmartShift may not tell your battery to charge or discharge very often, perhaps for a few days in a row. This may happen when prices aren't particularly volatile or feed-in tariff prices are relatively low.
SmartShift generates forecasts for your system every five minutes and creates a plan to minimise your energy costs. When prices are flat, operating in self-consumption mode is often the optimal strategy. In this case, SmartShift won't tell your battery to discharge or charge, which also helps to prevent battery degradation.
SmartShift relies on forecasts for its decision making. If high prices are predicted in the future, it may make sense to charge now. However, these future prices aren’t locked in and can change within minutes, so not every forecast can be completely accurate.
If you see that SmartShift charged your battery at a certain price, but prices then fell even lower, this is usually because the future prices forecast at the point of charging your battery was different to what eventually happened.
Solar curtailment is when your solar inverter is instructed to temporarily stop generating electricity. If you have a system that supports on/off curtailment (such as some FoxESS models), SmartShift may completely pause your solar production during periods when solar feed-in prices are negative.
The solar curtailment feature is only available for FoxESS inverters.
When solar feed-in prices go negative, exporting energy actually costs you money. SmartShift automatically compares:
your home’s current energy usage (if available)
the cost of exporting
the cost of buying electricity from the grid.
It then chooses the cheapest option.
If your home’s energy demand is low and exporting would cost more than buying from the grid, SmartShift will:
Curtail your solar panels (generate zero energy)
Allow your home to draw power from the grid instead.
Because solar feed-in prices are negative during these times, the grid electricity cost will be extremely low.
If your energy use is high and SmartShift determines it’s cheaper to use your own solar:
Your panels will generate electricity normally
Your home will benefit from zero cost solar energy.
Any excess solar you cannot use at that moment will still be exported to the grid.
Your Battery
SmartShift will sometimes tell your battery to preserve its charge, meaning that your battery will maintain its current level of charge. This will prevent the battery discharging to power your home or export to the grid. It will also stop it charging from both your excess generation and the grid.
This may happen because:
The battery is preserving charge during the day: In spring and summer, solar production is generally high, and export prices to the grid can go negative for parts of the day if demand is low. If SmartShift expects solar production to be greater than the excess capacity in the battery, and is predicting low (or negative) export prices, it may put your battery into Preserve Charge mode, to save battery capacity to fill when export prices are at their lowest. For customers without curtailment, SmartShift will sometimes send preserve commands for part of the day.
The battery is preserving charge overnight: In winter, solar production is usually lower and morning price peaks are common. If your battery isn't full, overnight prices are low and a morning price peak is forecast, SmartShift may tell your battery to preserve charge for part of the night. This will let you use grid energy for your home at the cheapest part of the day, supply your home with battery energy during the morning price peak, then charge your battery from solar during the day.
SmartShift will never tell your battery to increase its charge level by importing from the grid during the demand window.
If you’re seeing charging and discharging actions that don't align with what the SmartShift plan is meant to be doing during the demand window, please check whether you have a time-based control set up in your battery's app. Change this to self-powered to stop the unexpected behaviour.
Sometimes there can be differences between three sources of data:
The data shown in the Usage tab of the EcoFlex app
The data shown on the Live and Plan screen in the Devices tab of the EcoFlex app
The data shown in your battery/solar/wind manufacturer's app.
The data shown in the Usage tab of the EcoFlex app reflects data from the grid-point electricity meter for billing. This meter data undergoes rigorous validation and is the official source of usage information, which is also why it only becomes available in the app the following day.
The data on the Devices tab of the EcoFlex app and the information in your battery/solar/wind manufacturer's app comes from the system itself. It’s quite common for solar, wind or battery systems to report slightly different data to the grid-point meter, simply because they’re measuring from different points in the system. While your inverter tracks energy behind the meter, the grid-point meter measures everything flowing to and from the grid connection point.
Additionally, if you have a three-phase site or have a controlled load, these can sometimes sit outside of what's captured by your battery/solar/wind device and that can cause differences in what's reported between the electricity meter and your battery/solar/wind system. If you’re concerned about this, your installer is best placed to look into it. They can check the setup on-site to make sure everything is configured to detect energy flows accurately.
It's also common for there to be a lag between what's displayed on the Live and Plan screens in the Devices tab of the EcoFlex app, and what’s shown in your battery/solar/wind manufacturer's app. We refresh your system's data every five minutes, but for some manufacturers there can be an additional delay of up to 10 minutes in data updates.