Anyone else finding the grid outages lately actually a bit of a wake-up call?

Been thinking about this a lot lately. Every time the neighbours are scrambling for candles and ringing Western Power to moan, I'm just... making a cup of tea. No drama whatsoever.

I've been off-grid for about three years now with a Victron MultiPlus-II and a bank of Fogstar Drift lithium cells, and honestly moments like these are when it really clicks — this is why I did it. Not just for the bills, but for the actual resilience.

What I find interesting is the reaction from people around me. A few who were quite sceptical before are suddenly asking questions. One neighbour actually came over during the last outage wanting to know where to start. Sent him over to this forum, so he might be lurking!

I do think there's a wider point though — the grid in parts of the UK is genuinely ageing and storm seasons are getting rougher. It's not doom-mongering to say outages could become more frequent.

For anyone newly curious after recent events, a few things worth considering before jumping in:

• Even a small hybrid setup buys you a lot of comfort
• Battery-first thinking changes how you size everything
• Don't underestimate your actual consumption before buying kit

Curious whether others have seen a shift in attitude from people around them? And has anyone actually expanded their setup off the back of recent outages — added capacity, backup comms, anything like that? Would love to know what's changed for people practically, not just philosophically.

@WelshSolar mate, nothing quite hits different than watching your neighbour's Ring doorbell go offline while your kettle's still singing — that's the off-grid smug tax paying dividends right there. 🍵

My Victron setup in the van didn't even blink last week when half the street went dark, and I'll be honest, I did absolutely nothing to hide my satisfaction. Zero. Not a shred of remorse.

Though I'll say this — it's made me properly reconsider whether my backup capacity is actually as solid as I think it is, or whether I've just been lucky with short outages. Anyone done a proper load test to simulate a 48-hour grid-down scenario? Fogstar cells are supposedly brilliant for deep cycling but I've never actually pushed mine that hard deliberately.

Smug is fine until you're the one hunting for candles.

@WelshSolar the psychological shift is underrated, honestly. There's a point you cross where outages become genuinely irrelevant rather than just "less bad," and it changes how you relate to the whole energy system.

What I'd push back on slightly is assuming the system will hold under sustained bad weather. January this year, 11 consecutive overcast days on the Fens — I was very glad I'd oversized my battery bank (3x Fogstar Drift 200Ah) rather than cutting corners. Victron's SOC predictions also got quite pessimistic, which was actually reassuring rather than alarming.

The wake-up call framing is right, but the real lesson isn't "grid bad, solar good" — it's that resilience requires proper design margins, not just a few panels and a cheap inverter. Most people panic-buying solar kits won't have that.

Took three years of Victron obsession and enough Fogstar cells to ballast a narrowboat before I stopped flinching every time the wind picked up — now I actively hope for outages just to feel smug about my tiny house sitting there humming quietly like it owns the place.

@FenlandSolar nailed something I've been trying to articulate for ages. That psychological shift is real.

Spent two winters living full-time in my Transit conversion before I even considered a bricks-and-mortar place again. Power cuts were background noise — literally irrelevant. What actually surprised me was how angry it made me on behalf of other people. Standing in a Tesco car park during the January outages last year, watching a bloke frantically trying to keep his phone alive off a little Anker brick, and thinking: this is completely solvable.

The wake-up call isn't really about the grid failing. It's realising the grid was always one bad storm away from failing, and most people just... never looked at that too closely.

My Victron setup hasn't cared about a single outage in three years. That's not luck. That's just having done the homework beforehand.