A second tool has landed in the new Farming section, this one for anyone running a borehole.
Every borehole calculator I could find online only prices the drilling and the pump itself, then stops. None of them touch the ongoing electricity bill, which over a few years usually adds up to far more than the installation ever cost. This one works that out properly, in rands per month and rands per 1 000 litres, on the actual South African tariffs farms are billed on.
The part I think is genuinely useful, if you are on Eskom’s Ruraflex tariff, the time of use tariff most farms with a bigger connection sit on, peak rate electricity can cost up to four times what the same unit costs off-peak. A pump that just runs whenever it happens to be needed quietly pays that expensive rate a lot of the time. The calculator shows exactly what you would save by shifting pumping into a storage tank overnight instead, and checks whether your tank is actually big enough to make that switch work.
A few other things it does. You can put in your pump’s power rating if you know it, or tap one of the quick preset buttons if you only know it as “a 1 HP pump” or similar. If you do not know the rating at all, there is an estimate mode that works it out from your borehole depth and desired flow. It also works out cost to irrigate a given area, compares against a diesel generator, and has an honest solar saving estimate, the running cost you would avoid if you moved the pumping into daylight hours, with a link through to the full Solar Savings and Payback Calculator for anyone weighing up an actual conversion.
All the Ruraflex and Landrate rates are the 2026/27 figures straight off Eskom’s own published tariff schedule, not a rough guess.
If you run a borehole, I would value a real check against your own Eskom bill, does the off-peak saving line up with what you actually see, and is the peak versus off-peak split I am assuming for “pump whenever needed” close to how your pump actually behaves. Happy to adjust the defaults if farmers here can point out where it does not match reality.