Getting vertical gridlines to appear in line plot in matplotlib

You may need to give boolean arg in your calls, e.g. use ax.yaxis.grid(True) instead of ax.yaxis.grid(). Additionally, since you are using both of them you can combine into ax.grid, which works on both, rather than doing it once for each dimension.

ax = plt.gca()
ax.grid(True)

That should sort you out.