There is a particular conversation we have a few times a year, usually with someone who has just bought rural land or is thinking about it. They open with the same question. How off-grid are you? The honest answer, in our ninth year of running a nine-hectare smallholding on the South African Highveld, is not very. We are still on the grid for electricity. Our drinking water still arrives in 25-litre containers from town. The solar installation we have been planning for years remains a wishlist item. Two large pieces of machinery are sitting silent in the shed waiting for parts and the budget to install them. This is not the account most of the niche publishes.

Most off-grid living writing falls into one of two genre failures. The first is the triumphalist version: we did it, you can too, here’s a beautiful drone shot of our setup, click subscribe. The second is the doom-loop version: the system is collapsing, you must get off the grid before it is too late, here is the gear list, click buy. Both versions tell the reader the same thing — that the work is a destination, that the writers have arrived, and that the reader can too if they follow a few steps. Neither version is true to what working toward off-grid actually is.

The honest version, the one we wish we had read in year one, is that off-grid living is a journey in stages, not a destination — and most of the people who are honestly part of the journey are partway through it, the way we are. The piece below is what year nine looks like for us. What we have done. What we haven’t done. What is working. What broke. What we wished we had known sooner. Specific rand costs where we have them; honest acknowledgement of capital constraints where the work is still on the wishlist. No drone shots. No subscribe button.

What this isn’t

It is worth being plain about the two stories that get told in the niche, both of which we want to push back on.

The first story is the eco-romance. It comes with stock photography of bare feet on dewy grass, a single figure in a wide-brimmed hat handling fresh-laid eggs, a sun-flooded kitchen in a stone cottage with no visible electronics. The transition is sold as freedom, simplicity, oneness with the land, escape from the noise. There is something in this — there are days where the romance is real — but it is not the daily experience of the work. The daily experience is that something needs maintenance, something needs replacing, something needs cleaning, something needs improvising, and the year is a series of seasons each with its own list of things that do not do themselves. Romance does not describe that. Discipline does.

The second story is the doomer doctrine. It says the grid is failing, the country is failing, the household must therefore disconnect before the system breaks, and the urgency justifies any capital outlay made in haste. This is wrong in the other direction. The grid is more durable than the doomer reading allows; the household is not made safer by a panic-staged build; and the capital decisions made in fear are reliably worse than the ones made in patience. We are not making the transition because we believe the country is collapsing. We are making it because, on a property where we have chosen to be, the operation we want to run aligns with progressively fewer dependencies on infrastructure we do not control.

The honest third position is the one this piece is written from. Off-grid living is a choice with specific tradeoffs you live with daily, and whether it is the right choice depends on what you are optimising for. The published versions of the eco-romance and the doomer doctrine both skip the daily-tradeoff reality. We will not.

What we don’t have, honestly

The most useful place to start a piece written from a working smallholding is the list of things we still don’t have. Publishing this list is the single most disqualifying move for a triumphalist account, which is why most triumphalist accounts skip it. We will not.

We don’t have solar. A capital-cost solar PV installation for a property this size — even a modest one — runs into the high hundreds of thousands of rand once panels, inverter, battery storage, electrician’s certificate of compliance, and mounting infrastructure are all added. We do not currently have that capital available, and we have made the deliberate decision not to take on debt to compress the timeline. The system is on the wishlist. It will go in when the household economics support it; not before. In the meantime we are still on the Eskom grid for primary power, and we run a large generator that takes over when the grid fails, which is fairly often.

We don’t have drinkable water from the property. We have water — see the borehole section below — but the raw borehole water has an aggressively sulphurous smell and, more importantly, has not passed the chemical tests required for unmodified household drinking use. We have spent over R80,000 on filtration and treatment to bring it up to a quality usable for washing, gardening, livestock, and household greywater. Drinking water still arrives by car in 25-litre canisters from a municipal supply in the nearby town. The plan to bring potable water onto the property — reverse osmosis at a point-of-use, or a dedicated rainwater system for drinking — is on the same wishlist as the solar.

We don’t have a municipal disconnection. Some readers will find this clarifying. We are connected to grid services in ways an off-grid property by the strict definition is not. We pay Eskom. We are on the wireless internet provider’s network. We are not, in the strictest reading, off-grid at all — we are transitioning toward off-grid, in stages, on a budget that is genuinely the constraint.

We don’t have a working tractor or dumper this season. Both are old. Both broke. Both will require spare parts that are not easy to source and money that has been allocated to other priorities first. We are working manually for the moment and the productive scale of the operation has contracted accordingly.

The list of things we don’t have is roughly half the list of things people imagine when they hear “off-grid living”. Naming them is the most honest move available to a piece like this.

What we do have, and what it cost

The other half of the honest accounting is what is working, and what each piece of working infrastructure has cost us in rand and in years.

Water — borehole, storage, and treatment

The borehole on the property was here when we bought it. It pumps roughly 5,000 litres an hour when running, has not run dry in nine years (including through two drought summers), and is the spine of the property’s water supply. The pump is electric and runs off the same feed that runs the household, which means a power failure also takes out our water pressure unless the generator is up. We will return to the energy section for that.

The raw borehole water has a strong sulphurous odour — high in dissolved sulphides, characteristic of certain Highveld groundwater — and on its first lab test came back with several other markers that disqualified it for unfiltered drinking use. The investment we have made in treatment to date is more than R80,000, covering aeration, mechanical filtration, and the carbon-and-mineral cartridge stack that brings the household supply up to a usable standard. Usable means: laundry, dishwashing, showering, garden irrigation, livestock and pond top-up. It does not mean: drinking unmodified from the tap. Which is why drinking water still arrives in canisters.

Storage on the property is currently 15,000 litres in dark-green Jojo tanks under a steel stand. We have a planned expansion of an additional 300,000 litres — concrete or steel reservoirs — that will, when installed, give us roughly two months of household and pond resilience against pump failure, drought, or borehole interruption. The 300,000-litre figure is the one we plan to. It is not yet in the ground.

The South African groundwater regulatory framework is administered by the Department of Water and Sanitation and is the standing reference for any borehole-and-abstraction question; DWS rules cover registration, metering, and abstraction limits. The international authority on what makes household water actually safe — once it has been treated — is the WHO Guidelines for Drinking-water Quality, and any decision on potable water on the property will be measured against those.

Power — still on the grid, generator backup

We have not yet committed to a battery-and-inverter installation. We are researching it actively — sizing for the household load plus the borehole pump plus the small business we run from the property — and we expect to phase it in starting with an inverter and a modest battery bank that lets us ride through the more common Eskom interruptions without firing up the generator. Solar PV will follow when capital allows.

For now, primary power is the grid, and when it fails — which it does both predictably and unpredictably — we run a large diesel generator that services the plot’s essential needs: household supply, borehole pump, internet equipment, and refrigeration. The generator works. It is also expensive to run: at current diesel prices and at the load profile we draw, the operating cost is roughly R1,900 a day when it is running continuously. That is a real number on the household budget; it is also what pushes us toward the inverter-and-battery decision sooner rather than later.

For any electrical work on the property — and we have done plenty across nine years — the standing legal reference is SANS 10142-1, the wiring of premises. It is the standard a registered electrician will issue a certificate of compliance against. Any inverter, battery, or eventual solar installation we do will be built to that standard and certificated. We do not advise anyone to do otherwise on safety-critical electrical work, regardless of how cheap an uncertified install looks on quotation day.

Sanitation — septic, greywater, French drain

The septic system was the first major piece of infrastructure we replaced after moving in. The original was undersized, badly placed, and built without the on-site sanitation provisions in SANS 10400 Part Q, the South African building regulation that covers on-site sanitation. The replacement was expensive and necessary. It is the one piece of infrastructure on the property that has worked silently since installation and required no further intervention.

Greywater is managed separately. The discharge field for kitchen, laundry, and bathing greywater runs into a French-drain bed that has handled the household’s output without backing up or saturating, even through the wet summer just past.

Food production — gardens, pond, aquaponics, apiary

The food-producing infrastructure is the part we are most honest about: we are not where we want to be on this dimension, and the accounting is what it is.

Two small vegetable gardens are in production. They are smaller than the household’s appetite would support and they receive less attention than the household’s appetite would justify. We mention this because it is a real and common failure mode — more land than time — and the discipline of growing what the household actually eats, at a scale matched to the labour available, is one we are still working on. Coleman’s The Four-Season Harvest is the standing reference on intensive small-area year-round vegetable production and is the method work to invest in before scaling vegetable acreage. We get back to it every winter.

A 2,500-litre stocked pond carries Nile Bream. The pond is hooked up to an aquaponics loop — water-from-the-pond, nutrient-fed grow beds, return-to-the-pond. The aquaponics has not worked well at this property, despite three iterations of bed design and stocking density. We are considering converting the loop to a closed-loop hydroponic system that decouples the fish from the vegetables and lets each be managed separately. This is a live decision; we will report on it once we have run the new configuration through a full season.

Four working honey-bee hives sit on the eastern boundary. The 2025–2026 summer was extraordinarily wet — well above the regional median — and the bees never made surplus honey during the season; what they produced went into hive stores and overwintering. We do not extract from hives at the cost of the colony’s own survival, so spring and summer harvests this year were zero. Next season’s weather will determine next season’s harvest. Bees are a patient infrastructure.

Waste — compost and Bokashi

All food waste on the property goes into Bokashi buckets — anaerobic fermentation buckets that pre-process organic material — and is then layered into the three-bin compost rotation we run. The result is enough finished compost annually to meet the gardens, the orchard, and a small amount left over for soil amendment around the pond. We do not buy compost. We do not buy garden soil amendment. The waste loop closes on the property.

Connectivity — wireless internet, business from home

The household runs a business from the property and needs reliable connectivity for it. Internet is currently delivered over a wireless link to a local ISP’s tower; the connection is stable and reasonably fast. Its single point of failure is the household’s power supply — when the grid goes down and the generator is being temperamental, the router goes with it, and we are off-air. This is the single most acute reason a small UPS or, eventually, an inverter-and-battery on the router-and-modem feed is the next investment.

What hasn’t worked, and what it cost

Equally important — and routinely missing from this kind of writing — is the honest accounting of what has not worked. Some of this is mechanical failure. Some is biological. Some is weather. Some is our own labour budget. The piece below covers the four most visible failures of the last nine years.

The aquaponics loop. Three iterations of bed design, stocking density, and flow rate; none produced the integrated fish-and-vegetable output the system is marketed on. The fish were fine; the plants were not. We are not the first household to land here, and the literature on aquaponics at smallholding scale suggests the failure modes are predictable — pH drift, nutrient imbalance, ammonia-cycling friction at low scale — but the diagnostic work to dial each one in has been more than the household’s available time. The decision in front of us now is whether to decouple the system into a closed-loop hydroponic operation that does not depend on the pond chemistry, and we are leaning that way.

The wet-summer apiary harvest. The 2025–2026 summer was very wet. The bees foraged less than normal weather would allow, used what they brought in for hive stores, and we deliberately did not extract from a hive that needed its own honey for overwintering. The honest framing here is that the failure was the weather, not the bees, not the household. Beekeeping at this scale produces what the climate allows; the discipline is to leave the hives more honey when the season is poor, not to extract anyway. Next year’s harvest will reflect next year’s weather. There is no fix to the failure; the failure is the climate.

The tractor. A workhorse we inherited with the property, more than two decades old. Currently broken down and will require sourcing parts from a dealer who carries inventory for machines of this vintage. The parts are findable; the cost is several months’ worth of other priorities, and so the tractor has been sitting in the shed since the last cropping season. The productive scale of the gardens has contracted in proportion. We will get it back; we have not yet decided whether to replace it with a newer machine or commit to keeping the old one running with whatever it costs.

The dumper. A small site-dumper, similarly old, similarly down. The combination of tractor down and dumper down on a smallholding has a multiplicative effect on what is feasible — manual hauling of compost, of materials, of fence-line work — and the operation runs more slowly as a result. The decision frame is the same as the tractor: source parts at cost, or replace at greater cost. Neither path is fast; both are queued.

The honest reading across the four failures is the same: every working system on a smallholding ages, breaks, and eventually asks for a decision about whether to keep it running or replace it. The decision is rarely binary. It is rarely fast. It is rarely cheap. And it is the daily texture of the work — much more than the romance of being off-grid would suggest.

Lessons from year nine

The lessons section is the one most writers in this niche skip. We will not.

Things break, with monotonous regularity, in ways you did not anticipate. This is the lesson we wish someone had told us in year one. It is genuinely banal as a sentence; it is not banal as a daily experience. The roof flashing comes loose in a wind we have not seen in three years. The pump’s pressure switch fails on a Saturday morning when the household most needs water. The vehicle picks up a slow puncture on a track 20 minutes from the nearest tyre fitment. The honey bee swarm relocates to the eaves of the storage shed and the swarm-catcher equipment is the one item we never bought. Every one of these is a small thing. Their compounding effect is that the household member responsible for property maintenance does some piece of unplanned work almost every day, often discovering the problem only because something else broke first.

Capital cost is the binding constraint, not lack of will. Most of what we have not yet done — the solar installation, the larger water-storage reservoirs, the inverter capacity, the replacement of broken machinery — is gated by capital, not by knowing what to do or wanting to do it. The honest budget framing is what can the household afford in the next 12-month window without compromising other obligations? The answer is less than you think. The piece-by-piece staging that real households use is itself a discipline of the work. It is also the reason year nine looks the way it does rather than the way the brochure suggests.

Old equipment is its own decision. A 25-year-old tractor and a 20-year-old dumper are both useful when they run and silent when they don’t. The trade between cost-of-parts and cost-of-replacement is one we have made multiple times across the property, and neither answer is reliably right. What we have learned is to factor old-equipment downtime explicitly into the year’s labour plan, rather than treating each breakdown as a surprise.

The household economics of the journey are not what the YouTube videos suggest. The first five to ten years of the transition cost more than staying on the grid, by a comfortable margin. Solar pays back over a longer horizon than that; water treatment is ongoing; replacement parts compound. We did not commit to the transition because it was cheaper; we committed because it was the operation we wanted to run, on land we wanted to be on, for reasons the rand accounting alone never captured. That should be said clearly. The journey is worth it on its own terms; it is not worth it as a money-saving exercise.

What this looks like, by scale

More than most topics in this publication, the work is scale-dependent — and an honest treatment makes the picture clearer, especially for readers whose situation is not ours.

Townhouse

The honest answer at this scale is that the off-grid framing is the wrong framing, and a reader who has reached this far from a townhouse should adopt a different one. Resilience-in-place is the right frame at townhouse scale: 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; the basic 30-day pantry covered in our piece on the 30-day pantry to year-of-food. None of that is off-grid living. All of it is the right move at this scale. This framing assumes a property the reader controls; at townhouse scale, the reader does not, and the disciplines worth investing in are the ones that fit body-corporate constraints.

Suburban

The suburban scale is the one where partial off-grid living is genuinely achievable. A solar PV installation with a battery bank that covers the household’s normal load plus a reasonable margin. A rainwater capture system with enough storage to ride through the dry months on garden use. A small backup generator for the edge cases. A working vegetable garden of the kind described in our productive homestead at any scale piece. The household stays on municipal water and refuse and may stay on the grid as a backup, but functionally operates on its own infrastructure most of the time. The capital costs at this scale are real but much smaller than the rural-plot version, and the labour costs are correspondingly tractable. For most households drawn to this topic, the suburban version is the one that earns its keep.

Rural plot

The scale at which the transition is what we describe in this piece: multi-year, capital-staged, never quite complete. A serious rural-plot build is not finished in two years. It is sometimes not finished in nine. The decision is whether to commit to the journey knowing the timeline is decade-scale and the capital is staged, or to remain on a grid-dependent property and accept the dependencies that come with it. Both are defensible. The mistake is to begin the journey assuming the YouTube-clip timeline.

Common failure modes

The patterns of failure here are remarkably consistent.

  • Underestimating the capital cost of the transition. A serious solar installation, decent water infrastructure, replacement sanitation, and a working garden together run into the millions of rand over a multi-year build for a meaningful rural plot. The household budget that assumed a few hundred thousand and we’re done runs out in year two.
  • Treating off-grid living as a destination rather than a staged transition. Off-grid is a continuum, not a binary. The household that buys land expecting to be off the grid by month 18 is the household that gives up in month 24 when the timeline turns out to be longer.
  • Assuming everything will work. Old equipment fails. Weather varies. Borehole pumps burn out. Solar panels degrade. The household that has not pre-committed to the failure rate of complex outdoor infrastructure is the one most surprised by it.
  • Optimistic timelines. We’ll install solar in spring turns into we’ll install solar next spring turns into we’ll install solar when we can afford it. This is normal and not a moral failure. It is also not what the household imagined in year one.
  • The we’ll-save-money expectation. Off-grid living is more expensive than grid-dependent living for the first decade — sometimes longer. The household that committed because the maths looked attractive is the household that resents the operation in year four.
  • The labour reality. The smallholding produces what the household has labour to produce. More land than time is the binding constraint we have hit multiple times. The vegetable gardens are smaller than they should be because the household has not had the time to expand them. We need to pay more attention to the gardens is a sentence we have said annually for several years; it is also the sentence most working smallholdings say.

What I would tell year-one us

Three things.

Stage the capital aggressively. Do not try to build the property at once. Do not borrow to compress the timeline. The five things you will be most certain of in year one — which inverter, which solar layout, which pump, which septic configuration, which fencing — are five things you will revise by year three. Build the cheapest version that works for each system. Replace upward as the property’s lived configuration teaches you what it actually needs.

Get the water right before anything else. Water — borehole quality, storage volume, treatment stack, redundancy — is the single most underestimated piece of this infrastructure. Get a proper lab analysis of the borehole water in the first month, not the first year. Plan the treatment stack against the analysis, not against generic assumptions. Size storage for two months of total household and pond demand, not the salesperson’s suggestion. The capital you put into water in year one earns interest, in resilience and in not-being-surprised, for the entire life of the property.

Build the relationships before you need them. The local electrician, the local plumber, the local borehole contractor, the local agricultural mechanic, the neighbour who has been on the next property for thirty years. These are the people who will help you when something breaks at the worst possible moment, and they are also the only source of the local knowledge that the YouTube clips do not contain. Cultivate them deliberately in year one.

What to do next

If you are considering this kind of operation, the most useful next step is not to buy land. It is to walk the land of three or four households already running the kind of operation you imagine running, and to ask them three questions: What did you wish you knew in year one? What capital decision do you regret? What capital decision do you wish you had made sooner? Write the answers down. Cross-reference the ones that repeat. The land you eventually buy will be selected better as a result.

If you are partway through this kind of operation, the most useful next step is a cold honest audit of the household’s actual time and capital availability over the next 24 months — not the next ten years, and not the next six months. The decisions that compound across nine years are not the big capital decisions (those are usually well-considered); they are the labour-time allocation decisions that determine which gardens are tended, which equipment is maintained, which infrastructure is staged in next.

If you are already several years in on a property like ours — still on the grid, still partway through, still planning the next stage — you do not need a piece like this to tell you what to do. You need to keep going. The compounding of nine years of staged decisions is real. The property in year nine is unrecognisable from the property in year one, even if the journey is not finished. Stay in the game.

The companion pieces you will want next: our off-grid living pillar page for the broader topic map; the productive homestead at any scale for the food-production side of the operation; the 30-day pantry to year-of-food for the storage side of resilience; and the threat assessment from a former close-protection professional for the security framing that a rural property eventually has to engage with.

Take the planning worksheet with you. If you want a printable version of the staging math — an honest cost reference (transition-era figures from a smallholding broadly like ours alongside mid-2026 South African market estimates), a dependency-sequencing logic, and a blank five-year staging plan template — we’ve packaged it as a free downloadable PDF. One short email gets it to your inbox.

Sources cited in this piece

The honest version of off-grid living is the staged version. Year nine looks like this. Year one looked very different. Year fifteen will look different again. Stay in the game; build the cheapest thing that works first; replace upward; let the property teach you what it needs.