WattsOFF GRID
Start where you are

Pillar 01

Water

Getting it out of the ground, off the roof, and back out of the house clean enough to use twice.

BoreholesRainwaterGreywaterWetlandsThe natural pool

The short answer

Water is the first system to solve, because every other system waits on it. A drilling quote prices metres, not a finished supply — siting, casing, the pump, the rising main, electrical compliance and a SANS 241 analysis all sit outside it. The single most expensive mistake is buying the pump before the yield has been tested over a full working day.

Every other system on a smallholding is downstream of this one. You can run a house on a generator for a week; you cannot run a garden, a hive, a pond or a flock without water, and in an inland winter you cannot conjure it.

What makes water expensive here is not the drilling. It is the things nobody quotes for: the compliance certificate, the second pump after you burned the first, the analysis that tells you what is actually coming up. This pillar prices all of it.

Guides

In this pillar

Each one names its sources, and says plainly where a figure could not be sourced.

Cross-section diagram of a domestic borehole showing the wellhead, uPVC casing, submersible pump, rising main, static water level and the delivery line to a storage tank.

Water

What a borehole really costs in inland South Africa

A drilling quote is a rate, not a total. Here is what sits between the two, why the depth is the variable that decides everything, and the sequence that stops you buying the wrong pump.

Cross-section of a natural swimming pool showing the deep swimming zone, a submerged separating wall, the shallow planted regeneration zone with gravel substrate, and arrows showing water circulating between the two.

Water

Converting a chlorine pool to a natural swimming pool

A swimming pool filtered by plants instead of chemicals. What the regeneration zone has to do, how big it must be, and the arithmetic against ten years of chlorine and pump electricity.

Diagram of a rainwater harvesting system showing roof catchment area, gutter, first-flush diverter, storage tank with overflow, and the seasonal rainfall profile that determines tank sizing.

Water

Sizing rainwater tanks for inland South Africa rainfall

Our rain falls in six months and our dry season is brutal. The international sizing formulas assume neither, and following them will leave you with an empty tank in September.

The other six

Where this connects

Nothing on a smallholding is a closed system. These are the pillars this one touches most.

The Dispatch

One email a week, from the ground

What we are building, what we have sourced, and what it costs — with the supplier named and the quote dated. No affiliate padding, no doom, no filler.

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