Anyone else noticed their electricity bill creeping up even though they're barely on the grid anymore?

Living in a tiny house with a fairly decent Victron/Fogstar setup, I'm pulling maybe 2-3 kWh from the grid on a bad winter week — yet my standing charge alone is pushing £10/month now. Octopus have bumped it again and I can barely justify keeping the connection at all.

The frustrating part is the standing charge exists whether you use 1 unit or 1,000. Feels like we're being penalised for reducing grid dependency rather than rewarded for it.

I've been seriously looking at whether a full grid disconnect makes sense financially. The maths is getting closer than I'd have imagined two years ago — basically paying for the privilege of having a backup I rarely touch.

A few questions for anyone who's done similar sums:

• Has anyone actually gone fully off-grid and regretted it from a practical standpoint?
• Do you factor in the DNO disconnection costs when working out the break-even point?
• Any thoughts on whether standing charges will keep rising, or is there political pressure to reform them?

I suspect the standing charge model was designed for a time when nobody questioned their grid reliance. Now it's starting to look like a retention fee more than anything else.

Curious whether others with smaller setups — narrowboats, cabins, tiny homes — are hitting the same tipping point or whether I'm just being impatient with the numbers.

Same boat here @MV_Marine. Running a Victron setup in my garden office and the van is nearly self-sufficient, yet I'm still tethered to the grid for the house and that standing charge just feels like dead money at this point.

Does anyone know if there's actually a way to go full island mode legally in the UK without triggering a whole load of DNO paperwork? I've been wondering whether dropping to the lowest available Octopus tariff tier and treating grid as pure backup makes more financial sense than what I'm currently on.

Also curious — is the standing charge the same across all regions or does it vary? Mine's noticeably higher since moving to this location and I can't work out if that's a regional thing or just general price creep.

@MV_Marine the maddening irony is that the less you use the grid, the worse the standing charge-to-consumption ratio becomes. I've done the sums on my garden office setup — I'm paying roughly 40p/kWh effective rate once you factor in standing charges against my actual draw. At that point you start seriously eyeing up a full islanding setup with a decent transfer switch.

Worth looking at whether Octopus Flux or similar time-of-use tariffs actually help your specific usage pattern — for very low consumers they often don't, because the standing charge arithmetic just gets uglier.

The real kicker nobody mentions: grid connection fees are essentially a fixed infrastructure tax now, regardless of consumption. We're subsidising heavy users whether we like it or not. The business case for going fully off-grid gets more compelling every quarter honestly.

@TracyAllen raises an important point, but I'd push it further — has anyone actually done the maths on whether ditching the grid connection entirely becomes economically rational at some threshold?

My narrowboat situation is instructive: I'm paying the standing charge purely as insurance against extended bad weather when the Victron/Fogstar bank can't keep up. What's that "insurance" actually costing per kWh of genuine backup?

Genuinely curious whether anyone has modelled:

• Cost of increasing battery capacity to cover worst-case scenarios
• vs. cumulative standing charges over 5–10 years
• vs. a small generator as true backup

The DNO disconnection process in the UK is reportedly a bureaucratic nightmare, which presumably keeps many people paying standing charges longer than is strictly rational. Has anyone here actually gone through a full grid disconnection for a permanent dwelling?

@RogerKnight I've done exactly that maths and honestly it depends heavily on your situation. For me the break-even was surprisingly quick once I factored in not just the standing charge but also the export tariff I'd lose. That's the kicker people forget — if you're on SEG or Agile export, cutting the cord means giving up potentially £15-30/month in export payments depending on your system size. So perversely, staying connected can actually pay rather than cost. Worth checking what you're currently exporting before making any drastic decisions. I use the Victron VRM portal to track mine monthly. Anyone on a smart meter can pull the same data from their supplier too.