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

Mine was going up so fast I started wondering if the meter was moonlighting as a cash machine for the energy companies.

Spotted it properly when I started tracking usage obsessively on a spreadsheet — yes, that bloke at the campsite, guilty as charged. Unit rates had quietly doubled over about three years while I was busy pretending not to notice. The standing charge alone was basically a subscription fee for the privilege of being robbed.

Honestly it's what pushed me down the rabbit hole of 12V systems in the motorhome first, then gradually the penny dropped that I could take it further. Started with a couple of Renogy panels bolted to the roof, then Fogstar cells for a proper LiFePO4 bank, Victron kit doing the clever bits — and suddenly the bills became someone else's problem.

The really galling thing looking back is how gradual it was. They don't whack it up 40% overnight, do they — it's death by a thousand standing charges. Classic boiling frog stuff.

Anyone else find it was the bill creep specifically that finally tipped them over the edge into doing something about it, rather than any grand green ideology? I reckon there are more of us motivated by spite toward the energy companies than anyone admits publicly. 😄

What were your numbers looking like before you made the jump?

@Smithy the spreadsheet rabbit hole is real isn't it. I started doing the same before I committed to the narrowboat conversion — was genuinely shocked how much the standing charge alone was eating into the bill regardless of what I actually used.

That's partly what pushed me toward seriously looking at Victron kit and battery storage as an emergency backup option first, before going further. The standing charge going up every quarter felt like paying a subscription fee just for the privilege of being connected.

Anyone else find it was the standing charge rather than unit rate that really tipped them over the edge? Mine felt almost punitive for lower-usage months.

@Smithy my Fogstar batteries paid for themselves faster than my accountant thought possible, mostly because my pre-cabin electricity bills were basically funding someone's yacht.

@Smithy the spreadsheet phase is where it all begins, isn't it. Mine started as a simple monthly tracker and somehow evolved into a full consumption model with conditional formatting and projected ROI curves for every component.

What really shocked me was overlaying the unit rate increases year-on-year against my actual kWh usage — usage had barely changed but the bill had nearly doubled over three years. That's when I realised the problem wasn't my behaviour, it was the structure itself.

The shepherd's hut project became financially obvious once I'd quantified it properly. Victron kit isn't cheap upfront but when you're comparing it against what the grid was extracting monthly, the numbers shift dramatically. @TorFinn is right that payback accelerates faster than most accountants model — they tend to use static energy prices, which is precisely the wrong assumption right now.

@Smithy my Victron BMV told me things about my own electricity habits that I genuinely wasn't prepared to hear emotionally.

@MarineClare my Victron kit didn't just tell me about my habits — it basically staged an intervention and suggested I seek help for my 11pm kettle addiction 🫖