Anyone else noticed their electricity bill went up even after going solar?

Mate, my shepherd's hut runs entirely on a Victron/Fogstar setup and I haven't seen a grid bill in two years — meanwhile my brother-in-law slapped six panels on his semi, kept his grid connection, and somehow owes EDF more than before 🤣

The dirty secret nobody tells you: solar makes you overconfident. You think "ooh, free electricity!" so the tumble dryer runs at noon, the kettle gets boiled seventeen times, and suddenly you're treating every sunny afternoon like you've personally discovered fire. The behaviour change is what kills the savings.

Also worth checking:

• Standing charges — those haven't budged and in some areas they've crept up quietly while everyone was distracted by unit rates
• Export tariff faff — if you're not on a proper SEG deal you're basically gifting your surplus to the grid for a biscuit
• Inverter losses — cheap grid-tie inverters can be shockingly inefficient (pun absolutely intended)

Anyone running monitoring through something like Victron's VRM portal will spot this immediately — you can see exactly where your generated power is actually going. Highly recommend obsessing over the graphs at 11pm instead of sleeping, very healthy hobby.

What's everyone else's experience — did going solar actually change your usage habits, or did it just give you permission to be reckless?

@PikeGazer your brother-in-law's situation is the classic trap — the standing charge alone on most UK tariffs runs £300+ a year now before he's used a single unit. The panels offset consumption but they can't touch that fixed daily rate.

I went through this myself before committing to full off-grid. Had a hybrid setup for eighteen months and genuinely wondered why my bills barely shifted. The answer was always the standing charge, plus the fact that solar peaks when you're not home using the kettle and the washing machine.

The maths only really starts working in his favour if he's got a decent battery bank storing daytime generation — otherwise he's exporting cheap and importing expensive, which is the worst possible trade.

What's he actually storing overnight?

@PikeGazer this is something I see come up constantly and it's rarely the panels themselves causing the issue. The problem for most grid-tied homeowners is behavioural — they install solar, feel virtuous, and then unconsciously start using more. Tumble dryer on a cloudy Tuesday, kettle every half hour, you get the idea. The panels can't keep up and they're pulling from the grid without realising it.

Also worth mentioning — if your brother-in-law is on a smart meter, some suppliers have quietly been applying higher unit rates to accounts that export, which seems utterly backwards but here we are.

The standing charge point @Jock raised is spot on too. Without proper time-shifting and a decent battery behind those panels, he's essentially paying £300-odd a year just for the privilege of being connected. Might be worth a conversation about adding storage before anything else.

@PikeGazer worth checking whether your brother-in-law is actually exporting anything back to the grid and getting paid for it — if he's not signed up to the Smart Export Guarantee he's just giving that surplus away for nothing. That alone could offset the standing charge @Jock mentioned. Also worth asking whether his consumption habits changed after going solar — there's a well-documented tendency to think "oh I've got free electricity" and then start running the tumble dryer and dishwasher simultaneously at noon. The panels cover it fine in summer but the bill shock comes from winter evenings when he's still drawing heavily from the grid. A decent battery even a modest one would help enormously with that. Has he had his generation actually monitored properly or is he just assuming the system's performing as it should?

@Jock has touched on the standing charge issue but there's a more granular point worth making here: the shape of consumption matters enormously. Grid-tied systems with no battery storage only offset what you're actively consuming during generation hours. If your brother-in-law's household load is skewed toward evenings — cooking, heating, lighting — he'll be exporting cheap daytime generation whilst importing expensive peak-rate units. Net metering in the UK doesn't give you unit-for-unit credit; SEG export rates are typically 4-15p whilst import rates are pushing 24-29p on most tariffs. The arithmetic punishes that mismatch badly. My cabin setup avoids this entirely because everything runs through a Victron Multiplus and Fogstar lithium bank — generation is stored and consumed on my schedule, not the sun's. Without storage, grid-tied solar is essentially subsidising your DNO rather than yourself.