Who this is for
This course is written for someone who is seriously considering off-grid living and has not done it before. It assumes no trade background, no engineering, and no land yet. If you already have a parcel and a partly built system, the lessons still work; you will simply start further down the list.
It is deliberately not a course about a particular style of off-grid life. Whether you are heading for a small cabin in the northern woods, a desert homestead, or a converted farmhouse at the end of a long private road, the same five departments have to be answered: water, power, heat, waste, and access. The details differ enormously by climate and county. The sequence of decisions does not.
Why the lessons run in this order
The order is the single most useful thing here, because most expensive off-grid mistakes are ordering mistakes rather than technical ones. People buy land before checking whether it has water or whether the county will let them live on it. They buy panels before knowing their loads. They finish the interior before the envelope is closed. Each of those is a decision made before the information that should have driven it.
So the course starts with the life rather than the hardware, then land, then water, because water is a property of the land and cannot be added later. Loads come before panels because the load list sizes every other component. Batteries and inverters follow from loads. Wiring safety follows the components. Heat, shelter, and waste come next because they are the departments that decide whether the building is legal and habitable. Backup, money, and the first year close it out.
Work through it in order the first time even if you already know some of it. The order is doing work that individual articles cannot do.
How to use each lesson
Every lesson has the same four parts. The teaching sets out what the decision actually involves and where the traps are. Numbers to carry gives you the handful of figures worth holding in your head, hedged where the honest answer is a range rather than a fixed number. Read and Use point at the deeper guides, the calculators, and the reference tables on this site that go further than a lesson can. Do before the next lesson is the three or four things that turn reading into progress.
The Do items are the part that matters. Reading about load lists changes nothing; writing your own does. Most of them are free and take an evening. Several of them, done early, will save you thousands of dollars or spare you a parcel that was never going to work.
Mark lessons done as you go and the page keeps your place. If you are a member, progress is saved to your account and follows you between devices. There is also an email version that sends one lesson every three days, which suits people who would rather be nudged than remember.
What it costs, and what we do with your details
The course costs nothing and there is nothing to buy at the end of it. You do not need an account to read any of it; the account only exists so that progress can be saved and so that the community sections have real names attached.
If you take the email version, you get the twelve lessons and you can stop them from any email with one click. Some pages on this site carry affiliate links to gear, which is disclosed on every page that has them and explained in full on the affiliate disclosure page. No lesson recommends a product because of a commission, and the specification tables list what the manufacturers publish rather than what pays best.
What this course does not do
It does not replace your county. Off-grid rules are local to a degree that surprises people: what is routine in one county is prohibited in the next one over. The laws section of this site summarizes what public sources say for a great many states, counties, and towns, and every one of those pages tells you to confirm with the authority itself. Treat the lessons as the questions to ask, not as the answer.
It does not replace a licensed electrician, a driller, a soil evaluator, or a structural engineer. The wiring lesson in particular is about understanding the risk well enough to make good decisions and to know where your own limit is, not about qualifying you to do the work.
And it does not pretend the life suits everyone. The first lesson is largely about how to find out whether it suits you, including the ways to test it cheaply before committing. Deciding not to do it is a legitimate outcome of this course.
How long it takes, realistically
Each lesson is about twenty minutes to read and an evening to act on. Twelve lessons at your own pace is therefore a few weeks of evenings if you are moving quickly, or a comfortable three months on the email version. Neither is wrong. What matters is that the Do items actually get done, because they are where the decisions get made.
Some lessons will take much longer than an evening because they trigger real work: calling the county, arranging a soil test, or spending a fortnight measuring your own household loads. Those are the lessons doing their job. Treat the course as a checklist you return to over a build season rather than something to finish in a weekend.
Where the numbers come from
Figures in these lessons are hedged deliberately. Off-grid costs and quantities vary by climate, region, and year to a degree that makes a single confident number misleading more often than it is useful, so you will see ranges and the reasoning behind them rather than a precise figure with no provenance.
Where a calculator on this site produces a number, it shows the formula and the assumptions it used, and the method pages set out where the constants come from. Where a legal question is involved, the laws pages cite the statute or the agency document and tell you to confirm locally, because that is genuinely the only safe advice. If you ever find something here that is wrong, the corrections page explains how to tell us, and corrections are logged publicly rather than quietly edited.
If you are working through this with someone
Read the lessons separately and talk about them afterwards, rather than one person reading and reporting. The questions that decide whether this works for a household are in lessons one, eleven, and twelve, and they are worth both people answering independently before comparing.
The division of labor is the part that most reliably causes friction later, and it is easiest to settle now, in specific terms rather than in spirit. Who deals with the stove at six in the morning, who is comfortable on a roof, who handles the county, and who is the default when something mechanical breaks. Whoever ends up as that default will feel it, and so will the person who cannot fix things.
Do the Do items together where they involve the property or the money, and separately where they involve what each of you actually wants. A household in which one person wanted this life and the other was being agreeable finds that out in a hard February rather than in a good July, and the course is designed to bring it forward.
Where to go next
If you have not chosen land yet, lessons one and two plus the land check tool are the highest-value hours available to you. If you have land and are planning systems, start at lesson three and keep the planner open beside you. If you are already building, the backup, spares, and maintenance material is what most first-year households wish they had read sooner.
The blog goes deeper on individual subjects and is organized by topic, the calculators do the arithmetic with your own numbers and show the working, and the glossary is there for any term that turns up without explanation. Everything here is meant to be used together.
Ready when you are: start with lesson one, or jump to the system planner, the parcel check, or the laws by state and county.