Anyone else noticed their electricity bill creeping up even when they're barely using the grid?

Yeah, noticed this exact thing over the past couple of billing cycles. Even on months where I'm barely drawing from the grid — running almost everything through the cabin setup on Victron and Fogstar batteries — the bill still manages to creep upwards. Standing charges are the real killer if you ask me.

I'm paying something like 61p/day just to be connected, before I've used a single unit. That's over £220 a year for the privilege of having a grid connection I'm barely touching. Feels like the system is designed to punish people who've actually invested in reducing their consumption.

Anyone else tempted to just go fully off-grid and ditch the connection entirely? I've been doing the maths on it seriously lately. My cabin setup handles most things comfortably now and I'm wondering whether that standing charge money would be better spent on another 200Ah of lithium capacity.

The frustrating bit is that the more efficient you get, the more those fixed costs dominate your bill as a percentage. I went from using loads of grid power to almost none, but my bill didn't drop anywhere near as dramatically as I'd expected.

Curious whether anyone here has actually made the jump to fully disconnecting, or whether there are practical/legal reasons to keep the connection ticking over. Heard mixed things about what happens to your property value and insurance if you sever the DNO connection properly. Would love to hear real experiences rather than just theory.

@RetiredChef71 welcome to the forum, great to have you posting! 🎉

This is almost certainly your standing charge doing the heavy lifting. Most suppliers charge 50-60p/day regardless of consumption — so even a near-zero usage month still racks up £15-18 in fixed costs before you've drawn a single unit.

Worth checking your bill breakdown carefully — standing charge vs. unit rate are listed separately. Some members here have switched to zero standing charge tariffs (Octopus used to offer one) to mitigate this, though unit rates tend to be higher in exchange.

If you're already running Victron and Fogstar, you're clearly well set up — might be worth calculating your actual kWh draw vs. fixed costs to see where the real spend is.

@RetiredChef71 yeah standing charges are brutal now — some suppliers are pushing 60-70p/day which is £20+ a month before you've used a single unit.

Worth checking if you can drop to a lower tier tariff or even look at disconnecting entirely if your Victron/Fogstar setup is solid enough. Obviously depends on your DNO and whether you've got planning sorted for the static, but it's doable.

I looked into going fully off-grid for exactly this reason — paying to stay connected when you're barely using it feels like a scam tbh.

@RetiredChef71 worth pulling your actual bills and separating the standing charge from the unit rate line — most people are shocked when they see what proportion of their total is fixed overhead before they've drawn a single watt.

With my shepherds hut setup I got to a point where the standing charge was genuinely the dominant cost. Ran the numbers and at ~65p/day that's £237/year for essentially nothing beyond grid connection. Depending on your supplier, some still offer standing-charge-free tariffs (Utilita have historically offered one, though terms change) — worth investigating if you're genuinely grid-minimal.

The other thing to audit: anything on standby that's silently ticking away — routers, inverter chargers in absorption/float pulling small but constant loads. My Victron MPPT logs made that very visible once I actually looked.

@RetiredChef71 @PaulCross makes a good point about pulling the bills apart — once you've done that, it's also worth checking whether your supplier has you on the right meter type. I got stung for months because mine was still registered as a standard domestic property rather than reflecting my actual usage profile. Also, if you're genuinely barely touching the grid, it might be worth running the numbers on whether full disconnection makes financial sense. Depends on your DNO and what your setup can realistically handle through winter, but some folks on here have done the maths and found cutting the supply entirely pays back the disconnection fee within a year or two. What's your winter generation looking like with the Victron/Fogstar setup?