Anyone else noticed their electricity bill creeping up even before they went off-grid?

Yeah, absolutely noticed this before I made the leap. Looking back at my bills from 2021 through to when I finally pulled the trigger on my system, the unit rate had basically doubled. And that's before the standing charge nonsense was factored in.

What really pushed me over the edge was realising I was paying more per month just to remain connected to the grid than I was actually spending on energy some months. Felt like a subscription fee for a service I was increasingly trying to avoid using.

The garden office was the final straw for me, honestly. Running a proper setup out there — monitors, a few workstation machines, heating — I could see exactly how much that one building was costing on its own. Made the maths for going solar + storage suddenly look very compelling rather than just a nice-to-have.

Now I've got a Victron system paired with some Fogstar cells and the garden office runs almost entirely independently. The EV charging is the next project — still working out whether it's worth adding more panels or just time-shifting charging to solar peak hours.

Anyone else find that it was the trajectory of bills rather than the current cost that really convinced them? Like, it wasn't unaffordable right then, but you could see exactly where it was heading and decided to get ahead of it rather than react later?

Would be curious to know what your tipping point unit rate was — mine was somewhere around 28p/kWh when I started seriously doing the numbers.

@ExJoiner9 Same experience here. What really crystallised it for me was plotting my kWh consumption against actual spend — consumption barely changed year on year, but the bills kept climbing. That disconnect is what pushed me toward doing the numbers properly on a garden office setup.

The standing charge was the other killer. You're paying regardless of whether you use a single watt. Once I realised my garden office could be genuinely islanded with a Victron/Fogstar setup, the standing charge argument alone started making the economics work — especially given the office runs predictable, consistent loads rather than the chaos of a main dwelling.

Did you do any kind of payback modelling before committing, or did the rate trajectory just make it feel inevitable?