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

My Victron BMV told me I used 4p of grid electricity last month and somehow Octopus still found a way to charge me £23 for the privilege of existing as a customer. 🤌

The standing charge is the real villain here — it's essentially a subscription fee for a service I've almost entirely replaced with solar panels and a couple of Fogstar batteries out in the shepherd's hut. At this point I'm paying to look at the grid.

What gets me is the standing charge has quietly crept up something ridiculous over the past two years while everyone was distracted arguing about unit rates. Classic misdirection, that.

A few options I've been mulling over:

• Full disconnection — terrifying paperwork, apparently
• Lowest available tariff just to minimise the standing charge damage
• Export tariff to at least claw something back on the sunny days when the batteries are full and I'm basically donating electrons to the neighbours

Anyone actually gone full disconnection? I keep reading horror stories about reconnection costs if you ever sell the property, which feels like the grid's insurance policy against people like us escaping properly.

Would love to know how others are handling this — especially if you're in a rural area where the DNO seems to operate on its own baffling logic.

@RiverSpirit oh this is my absolute nightmare with the narrowboat setup — I'm barely plugged into shore power these days but the standing charge on my marina berth electric still comes out regardless. It's essentially a "well done for generating your own power, here's a fee for that" tax isn't it?

Genuine question for the thread — has anyone actually done the maths on whether it's worth keeping a grid connection at all vs just going full islanded with a beefier battery bank? I keep going back and forth on it.

My van conversion has no standing charge obviously (bliss) but the boat is different because I need that backup connection for winter when the solar is basically decorative. What's the threshold where it stops making financial sense to stay connected?

@RiverSpirit This is precisely why the standing charge model is so punishing for anyone with a well-designed off-grid or hybrid setup. Ofgem sets the standing charge framework and the DNOs effectively socialise grid infrastructure costs across all connected customers regardless of consumption — you're paying for capacity, not units.

On the narrowboat specifically, the question worth asking is whether maintaining that grid connection is actually worth it at all. Once your solar, battery bank, and potentially a generator backup are sized correctly, that £23/month standing charge becomes dead money. Over a year that's £276 for essentially nothing.

@HollyGaz same situation — if shore power is only occasional insurance rather than daily necessity, the maths for disconnecting entirely starts looking very compelling very quickly.

@RiverSpirit Had exactly this with my van setup last year. Kept a home address with British Gas "just in case" — you know, emergency backup thinking. Classic mistake.

The standing charge isn't paying for electricity. It's paying for the right to have electricity. Entirely different thing, and most people don't clock that distinction until it's too late.

Eventually I just terminated the contract altogether. Took about three months of bureaucratic misery to actually make it happen, mind you. But once it was done, that £23-odd vanished permanently.

The harder question nobody wants to answer is: what's your genuine backup plan when the Victron reports something properly wrong in January? That's what kept me paying standing charges longer than I should have. Worth being honest with yourself about it before making the leap.

@RiverSpirit The maddening thing is that standing charges have increased ~60% over the past three years while actual unit rates get all the headlines. For EV charging specifically I've been running the numbers on whether it's worth keeping a grid connection at all — the answer depends almost entirely on whether you need rapid AC charging overnight during winter when solar yield collapses.

My current setup uses a Victron Multiplus-II to buffer a Fogstar battery bank, so the car charges from stored solar with grid as genuine emergency backup only. The standing charge essentially becomes your "insurance premium" framing — but £23/month for four pence of actual consumption is a brutal ratio.

Worth checking if your DNO allows a temporary disconnection without full reinstatement costs. Some do, some absolutely don't.