Off-grid living is a staged transition, not a destination. Staged transitions are the only kind that work for working households. Most of what gets published in the niche reads as if the journey were a discrete state — either you have arrived or you have not — and most households who try to arrive at the discrete state in two years quit by year three. This page is what we will and will not write about that.

Our cornerstone — Off-grid living: nine honest years and still on the grid — is the long-form account of what the staged version actually looks like over nine years on nine hectares of South African Highveld. Read it for the systems detail: borehole and water treatment, the household’s still-on-the-grid power setup, the apiary that produced no surplus through a wet summer, the tractor and dumper sitting silent waiting for parts. This page is the broader positioning around the topic — where we stand, what we will and will not publish, and where to start if you are reading from a property that is not ours.

What this pillar isn’t

Two stories dominate the genre, and we want to be plain that we will not be telling either.

The first is the eco-romance: dewy bare feet in long grass, a wide-brimmed hat at the chicken coop, a stone cottage with no visible electronics and no visible work. The transition is sold as freedom, simplicity, oneness with the land — a state achieved rather than a process lived. There are days where the romance is real: the morning rounds in the cool early hours, the bee swarm settling in a tree, the long evening on the verandah after a productive day in the garden. But the romance is not the daily texture of the work. The daily texture is that something needs maintenance, replacement, cleaning, or improvising — and the year is a series of seasons each with its own list of things that do not do themselves. We will write about the daily texture. We will not write about the romance.

The second is the doomer doctrine: the grid is failing, the country is failing, the household must therefore disconnect before the system collapses, and the urgency justifies any capital outlay made in haste. This story is wrong in the other direction. The grid is more durable than the doomer reading allows; the country has lived through worse than its current configuration multiple times in living memory; and the capital decisions made in fear are reliably worse than the ones made in patience. We are not committed to this work because we believe the country is collapsing. We are committed to it because, on a property we have chosen to be on, the operation we want to run aligns with progressively fewer dependencies on infrastructure we do not control.

There is a third position, which is the one we hold. Off-grid living is a choice with specific tradeoffs the household lives with daily, and whether it is the right choice depends on what the household is optimising for. The third position requires no urgency hooks, no doomsday framing, no salesmanship. It also produces a different kind of writing: less brochure, more long-running honest accounting.

Where to start, by scale

The pillar applies differently at three scales, and the most useful editorial position is to be plain about where each reader should start.

Townhouse

Most readers drawn to the topic from a townhouse or apartment are reading the wrong content. The framing assumes a property the reader controls — perimeter, roof, ground, borehole rights — and at this scale they do not. The right discipline at townhouse scale is resilience-in-place: a battery pack and inverter sized to ride through scheduled power interruptions, a reasonable water buffer in food-grade containers, a small emergency cooking option that does not depend on the grid, and the basic 30-day pantry primer. None of that is off-grid living. All of it is the right move. The townhouse reader who wants to engage with the larger journey is best served by mastering resilience-in-place first, then re-reading our coverage from inside a property they have begun to control.

Suburban

The suburban scale is where partial off-grid is genuinely achievable. Solar PV with battery storage, rainwater capture, a small backup generator, and a working vegetable garden of the kind described in our coverage of the productive homestead — the household stays on municipal water and refuse and may stay on the grid as backup, but functionally operates on its own infrastructure most of the time. The capital cost is real but much smaller than the rural-plot version, and the labour is correspondingly tractable. The sizing exercise — what the household actually uses, summer and winter — comes first; the panels and inverter follow. The suburban version is the one we expect to publish on most in this pillar.

Rural plot

The rural-plot scale is the one our cornerstone describes: multi-year, capital-staged, never quite complete. A serious rural build is not finished in two years; it is sometimes not finished in nine. The decision is whether to commit to the timeline knowing it is decade-scale and the capital is staged, or to remain on a grid-dependent property and accept the dependencies that come with that. Both are defensible choices. The mistake is to begin the rural journey assuming a YouTube-clip timeline.

What we will publish

Cluster posts inside this pillar — the more specific pieces that sit underneath the cornerstone — are in development. We expect to publish on solar PV system sizing without the marketing, on borehole water from source to tap, on septic and greywater systems honestly assessed, on the actual operating cost of generator-backed grid living, and on inverter-and-battery configurations that work when capital is staged. Each will share the cornerstone’s editorial spine: costs in real rand, failure modes named, the difference between the brochure and the lived account given plainly.

Where a piece is not yet published but is being referenced from the cornerstone, the slug is in place and will resolve when the writing lands. Until then, the cornerstone is the place to start.

What we will not publish, while we are being plain about it: gear reviews dressed as editorial, affiliate-driven product recommendations, urgency-framed buy-now guidance, and the speculative pieces that compare the cost of going off-grid to the cost of staying on the grid using assumptions imported from other countries. The South African electricity, water, and regulatory context is specific. The economic accounting that holds in California or Queensland does not translate cleanly, and we will not pretend otherwise.

Our specific lens on this work

The publication’s coverage of off-grid living is anchored by nine years of running a working smallholding on nine hectares of South African Highveld. That is not a credential we offer as marketing; it is a credential we offer as scope-limit. We can write authoritatively about systems we have run, broken, repaired, replaced, and made decisions about on a real property under real constraints. We can write less authoritatively about systems we have not run — particular high-altitude configurations, particular hybrid setups that depend on local code provisions we have not navigated, particular climates the Highveld doesn’t share.

The honest lens is that the publication’s voice on this work is shaped by one household’s nine-year experiment, and that experiment is still in progress. The decisions we made in year one we would not make in year nine. The decisions we will make in year ten we cannot fully predict from year nine. Our job is to be honest about the experiment as it unfolds — including the parts that did not work and the parts that have not yet been tried. Where the credentials carry weight, we will use them. Where they run out, we will say so. For the broader publication position — voice, principles, what we publish and don’t — see about this publication.

Sources cited in this guide

Start at the scale that matches the property you actually have. Read the cornerstone for the systems detail. Then begin where you are.