Anyone else noticed their electricity bill went up even though they're using less from the grid?

Yeah, classic standing charge creep — happens every year and barely gets reported properly.

My grid usage is down about 60% since I finished my solar setup last spring (4.2kW array + Fogstar Drift 200Ah), but my bill is still higher than two years ago. The standing charge on my tariff jumped from about 28p/day to nearly 53p/day over the same period. So even pulling almost nothing from the grid, I'm still paying £190+ a year just to be connected.

Makes you wonder why more people aren't talking about going fully off-grid. I get it's not practical for everyone, especially in a house, but for those of us with cabins or outbuildings it's genuinely worth running the numbers.

A few things worth checking on your bills:

• Standing charge increases — often buried in small print
• Unit rate vs. daily charge split — the unit rate might look stable while the daily charge quietly rockets
• Whether you're on the best tariff — some providers still have lower standing charges if you hunt around

I've been half-tempted to ditch the grid connection entirely and just use the EV as backup storage when the Fogstar bank runs low, but I'm not quite there yet technically.

Anyone else crunched the numbers on whether the standing charge alone is eating your savings? Would be curious what tariffs people are on — I'm with Octopus currently but not convinced it's optimal anymore.

@XU_VanLife welcome to the wonderful world of "using less but paying more" — the energy suppliers' favourite magic trick! 🎩

It's basically the grid equivalent of a gym membership. You barely use it, but they'll still have their £1.50 a day whether you like it or not.

My Victron setup has knocked my import

@XU_VanLife the standing charge situation is genuinely maddening — Ofgem keeps tinkering round the edges but nothing substantive changes. Worth knowing that if you're on a standard variable tariff you might actually do better switching to one of the time-of-use tariffs like Octopus Agile or Go. With a decent battery setup like your Fogstar you can charge overnight at cheap rates and lean even harder on solar during the day, which at least makes the standing charge feel a bit less painful by squeezing more value out of every unit you do pull from the grid. Some people with larger setups are also looking at going fully off-grid to escape it entirely, though that's obviously a big commitment depending on your situation.

@XU_VanLife this is exactly why I ran the numbers properly before committing to my garden office solar setup. Standing charges across most tariffs are now sitting at 50-60p/day — that's £180-220/year before you've consumed a single unit. When you're pulling minimal grid power, that fixed cost dominates your bill completely.

Worth looking at whether Economy 7 or an EV-specific tariff actually suits your usage pattern better now your consumption profile has changed so dramatically. Some of the Octopus tariffs restructure things interestingly if you've got battery storage to play with overnight cheap-rate windows.

My Victron system logs everything obsessively and honestly the grid import figures are almost embarrassing given what I'm paying just to stay connected — sometimes wonder if the maths on going fully islanded makes more sense than I'd previously assumed.

@XU_VanLife worth knowing that Ofgem have actually been consulting on standing charge reform — there's been talk of shifting more cost into the unit rate instead, which would obviously help heavy users but benefit us lot considerably. Whether anything meaningful comes of it is another matter entirely.

One thing I'd suggest: have you looked at whether your supplier offers any EV or battery tariffs? Some like Octopus Intelligent or their Flux tariff are actually structured in ways that work reasonably well with home storage setups — potentially letting you sell back during peak periods and offset some of that standing charge pain. Depends on your DNO and setup obviously, but with a Fogstar Drift 20 you'd likely have enough capacity to make it worthwhile running the numbers.