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

Noticed this creeping in over the last couple of years with my static caravan setup. Even when I'm pulling almost nothing from the grid — just keeping a small backup connection alive — the standing charge alone is now eye-watering. Mine jumped to something like 61p a day before I even touch a single unit of electricity.

That's what finally pushed me to go properly off-grid with the cabin. I've got a Victron system paired with some Fogstar cells, and the standing charge conversation basically paid for itself in my head the moment I ran the numbers. Once you're generating and storing your own power, that daily meter "rental" fee starts feeling like paying rent on a house you never visit.

The frustrating bit is that the standing charge hikes seem to get buried in the small print. Your actual unit rate gets all the headlines, but it's the fixed daily cost that's quietly doing the damage for anyone who's already reduced consumption significantly.

Anyone else found that low-usage households are actually getting hit proportionally harder? If you've cut your units right down through solar or batteries, you're still paying that fixed daily rate — so your effective cost-per-unit used goes through the roof when you do the maths properly.

Would be curious whether anyone's gone down the route of fully surrendering the grid connection entirely, or whether most people here are keeping it as a backup like me. There's always that nagging feeling you might need it one winter week when the sun disappears for a fortnight.

@SparkySparky this hit me right in the gut because it's exactly why I went deeper into solar on the motorhome and basically stopped relying on hookup altogether.

The standing charge is the quiet villain nobody talks about. Octopus kept bumping mine up and I realised I was paying essentially for the privilege of having electricity available, not for actually using it.

What finally made sense of it for me was tracking my grid draw properly — I threw a Victron Cerbo GX into the system and suddenly had proper visibility. Turns out I was pulling tiny phantom loads constantly that I'd never noticed.

The standing charge argument is really the strongest case for going properly off-grid if your situation allows it. You're essentially being taxed for existing as a customer, regardless of consumption.

@SparkySparky the standing charge is the real villain of the piece, isn't it. I remember sitting in my cabin last winter, watching my Victron Cerbo showing I'd pulled maybe 4 units from the grid all month — yet the bill still stung because the daily standing charge had quietly crept up to nearly 60p/day. That's £18 gone before I'd even switched a light on.

It's what finally pushed me to properly size my Fogstar battery bank and treat the grid connection as a genuine last resort rather than a lazy fallback.

Worth actually calculating what your standing charge alone costs annually — for a lot of static caravan owners the maths starts favouring a complete disconnect faster than you'd expect.

@SparkySparky yep, and this is exactly why I ended up going full off-grid with the shepherd's hut rather than keeping a grid backup "just in case." The standing charge arithmetic just doesn't work when you're only pulling a trickle.

Worth actually doing the numbers — most people don't realise how much of their annual bill is purely standing charge before they've used a single unit. On some tariffs it's close to £300/year now just to have the connection.

If you're already running decent solar with a Victron setup and a proper battery bank, ask yourself honestly what the grid backup is actually doing for you. For most small off-grid setups a generator covers emergencies cheaper than the annual standing charge will.

Might be worth crunching whether that connection is genuinely earning its keep.

@SparkySparky the numbers that really shifted my thinking were when I actually logged twelve months of standing charges on a spreadsheet and compared them against what grid power I'd actually consumed. The standing charge was costing me more than the units themselves most months.

On the Ducato I'm obviously fully off-grid, but I went through exactly this calculation before committing to the cabin setup. What pushed me toward a properly sized Victron/Fogstar system rather than maintaining a grid connection was realising the standing charge alone would've paid for meaningful battery capacity within three or four years.

Worth running the maths properly — take your annual standing charge total and treat it as a capital budget. That figure alone often justifies more system than people expect.

@SparkySparky yeah same situation with my static. Standing charge on the backup connection was quietly eating £15-20/month and I was pulling almost nothing through it.

Ended up doing the maths properly and it just didn't add up. Dropped the grid connection entirely last spring — running Victron MultiPlus, Fogstar lithium bank, and enough panels on the roof to keep comfortable through most of the year.

Summer's obviously fine. Winter's where it gets sketchy if you've had a run of grey weeks.

But even accounting for the occasional generator top-up, I'm still ahead vs what I was paying in standing charges alone. And that's before touching actual unit rates.

The grid companies bank on people keeping "just in case" connections they barely use. Classic drip-drain.