Real Money Savings - A Plug That Pays For Itself in Just Three Months

The whole point of Windfall Energy is to help you use cheaper and greener electricity.

Our products do this by taking advantage of the fact that electricity here in the UK is usually cheaper and greener in the middle of the night. At niight, wind turbines are turning but people are using less of the electricity generated.

The two products we have in development are a home battery for flats and apartments and a smart plug. Both products allow you to capture that green energy, but they work in different ways.

How they work

The idea behind the Windfall Battery is pretty simple. It charges up at night and then your home uses that energy in the day. Due to the difference in price and carbon emissions between those two times, you can both save money and reduce your carbon footprint.

The Windfall Plug on the other hand doesn’t store any electricity, but it does allow you to control the times that you use electricity.

Pretty much anything with a battery can be plugged into a Windfall Plug and the plug will check electricity prices and only charge your devices at the optimum times. Cordless vacuum cleaners, laptops/tablets/phones, cordless power tools and all good examples.

In that way, it’s easy to imagine plugging your phone into a Windfall Plug and know that you’ll wake up with a phone full of green electrons. However, as satisfying as that experience is, the amount of electricity it takes to charge a phone is pretty small.

More impact - drying clothes

If you want more impact from your Windfall Plug, another way to use it is with more power-hungry appliances that can run at night.

These aren’t devices with a battery, but things that are mains-powered and whose time of use can be flexible. A couple of great examples of this is for dehumidifiers and heated clothes airers.

Whilst maybe not as glamorous as charging all your fancy portable devices, there’s a massive difference in using a Windfall Plug in this way. A mobile phone might use 15W to charge, whereas a heated clothes airer can use over 300W - 20 times more power.

One of the beta testers for our plugs has done exactly that.

Chris has plugged his heated clothes dryer into his Windfall Plug. He’s set it up to come on for four hours at night. The plug then looks at the energy forecast for that time and picks the best four hours to turn on his airer to maximise his cost savings and minimise his carbon emissions.

In the just over half a month he’s been running it with this heated clothes airer, the Windfall app shows that Chris’s airer has used 16.36 kWh during the ‘Windfall Hours’ when it’s been turned on. And that energy was 80% from renewable sources when the average is usually around 60%.

The yellow line in this chart below shows the carbon emissions based on the UK energy mix over three days in February. The black line shows Chris’s plug only turning on when emissions are at their lowest.

Chris’s tariff gives him around a 20p saving per kWh at night compared with in the day. So in the space of a month he can save around £6 running his heated clothes airer for a few hours at night during the “Windfall hours”.

When our Windfall Plugs are widely available we expect them to sell for around £20, so in Chris’s case a plug would pretty much pay for itself in just three months.

A Windfall Plug won’t have the same overall impact as the Windfall Battery will, but for its cheap price and flexibility surely it’s a no-brainer.