Staged transitions to off-grid: a planning worksheet.

— WHAT'S INSIDE

Five questions, two pricing vintages, one staged plan.

The worksheet walks the same five questions a household partway through this transition would ask itself at the start of any planning year. The questions are simple; the cost references are the part most planning worksheets get wrong. We carry two columns deliberately: transition-era reference figures from nine years on a working smallholding, and mid-2026 market reference figures from current South African quotes. Don't blend them — and we say so explicitly.

• Question 1 — where are you now? An audit of your household's current dependencies (power, water, sanitation, heating, cooling, comms) and what each costs per month.
• Question 2 — what change matters most? A top-three ranking exercise across the six off-grid systems, with the primer's standing order (water first, sanitation second, power staged) as a reference.
• Question 3 — honest cost reference. Side-by-side tables for water (borehole + treatment + storage), power (generator → inverter → solar PV), sanitation (septic + greywater + alternatives), heating + cooling, and comms. Transition-era figures alongside mid-2026 market reference.
• Question 4 — sequencing logic. Why water comes first, why sanitation can't be deferred, why power is staged rather than installed in one go. Plus prompts to identify what each of your priorities depends on.
• Question 5 — your five-year staging plan. Blank year-by-year template. Sanity-check against the cost of staying on the grid over the same five years.

Plus a brief reminder of what the worksheet isn't (engineering advice, financial guarantee) and the South African regulatory standards that any installation has to be designed and certificated against — SANS 10142-1 for electrical, SANS 10400 Part Q for sanitation, the DWS framework for groundwater.

— WHAT THIS ISN'T

Not engineering advice. Not a financial guarantee.

Solar PV sizing, septic design, borehole pump selection, electrical interconnection — all of those need a registered professional, designed and certificated against the South African standards. The worksheet is the decision-support tool that surfaces what to commission and in what order. We're also explicit that off-grid living is not a money-saving exercise on a ten-year horizon. It's a choice with specific tradeoffs made for reasons the rand accounting alone never captures — the primer is unambiguous on this point and the worksheet inherits the framing.

— DOWNLOAD

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— THE PUBLICATION

Where this worksheet comes from.

Survival & Prepping is a serious editorial publication on self-reliance, security, off-grid living, homesteading at any scale, and food security. Calm, evidence-led, scoped to the South African household, anti-fearmongering. The off-grid primer is one of our four cornerstones — written from nine years on a Highveld smallholding, partway through the staged transition it describes. This worksheet is its companion artifact. Read more about the publication or browse the primer itself.