Anyone else noticed their electricity bills gone mental this quarter?

Yeah mine jumped about 40% compared to same quarter last year. Standing charges alone are a joke now.

Honestly it's what pushed me to finally sort out proper battery backup. Got a Victron Multiplus sitting between the grid and my critical loads — fridge, router, a few lights. When prices spike overnight I'm running off stored energy instead. Not fully off-grid but it takes the edge off.

The frustrating thing is the unit rate hikes get all the headlines but it's the standing charge creep that really stings if you're a low consumer. Feels like you're being penalised for not using much.

Anyone on Agile or similar time-of-use tariffs finding it worth it still? I keep meaning to switch but the faff puts me off. Curious whether people are actually saving or just spending hours optimising for pennies.

Also — has anyone noticed their supplier's estimated bills going completely haywire? Mine estimated I'd used double what I actually had. Took three calls to sort. Absolute shambles.

Would be interested to know what others are doing to cut exposure to the next price cap change. Feel like it's only going one direction long term.

@LDVSolar same thing happened to me three years back — bill landed on the doormat and I nearly choked on my brew. That was the moment I stopped thinking about going off-grid and actually did something about it.

Started modest — a couple of Fogstar lithium cells and a small Victron setup for the garden office. Now the main house is largely sorted too. Standing charges are the real killer though, aren't they? You can slash your consumption all you like but that daily flat rate just sits there laughing at you.

Worth doing a proper audit of your baseload before throwing money at batteries — I wasted a good few months oversizing things because I hadn't identified two ancient chest freezers quietly guzzling away in the outbuilding. 🤦

What capacity Multiplus did you go for?

Right so this is basically my origin story too — sitting in my static caravan one evening watching the electric meter spin like a fruit machine and thinking something has to change.

Took me about six months of dithering before I actually committed. Went Victron Multiplus-II with a pair of Fogstar Drift 200Ah lithiums and a modest 800W of panels on the roof.

First bill after the system was properly dialled in?

I actually laughed.

The standing charge is still the unavoidable villain obviously — nothing you can do there short of going fully off-grid, which for a static on a park site isn't always practical. But the unit consumption side... genuinely transformed.

@LDVSolar what size Multiplus did you end up going with? The 2kVA and 3kVA are worlds apart depending on what you're running simultaneously.

@LDVSolar the standing charge element is what really gets me — you're paying before you've consumed a single watt. It's effectively a tax on grid connection.

Worth noting that once you've got the Multiplus sorted, your actual consumption becomes much more visible and that alone changes behaviour. I track mine obsessively through Victron's VRM portal and the data is genuinely eye-opening.

One thing people overlook when calculating payback: factor in the unit rate trajectory, not just current prices. Ofgem's price cap mechanism means these charges only ever seem to drift upward over time. My off-grid cabin setup at my array location has insulated me from three consecutive quarterly spikes now — the numbers look increasingly favourable each time I run them.

What capacity Multiplus did you go for? The 2400VA versus 3000VA decision matters quite a lot depending on what loads you're protecting.

@Paddy standing charge is basically a subscription fee for the privilege of being robbed — went off-grid on the narrowboat three years ago and genuinely haven't missed a single direct debit.

Same here — standing charge is what finally broke me. Running my van conversion full time now and the Fogstar lithiums have been solid. Did the maths and I'm saving enough monthly to have paid off the battery bank inside 18 months.

Worth looking at your overnight rate too if you're on Agile or similar — that's where the real arbitrage is for home backup setups. Charge cheap, discharge during peak. Victron's scheduling makes it dead easy once you get your head round it.

@LDVSolar what size Multiplus did you go for? I ran a 12/3000 in the van but for proper house backup you'd want the 24 or 48v versions really.