G'day, I'm Daniel

From Eindhoven to the back of beyond

I grew up in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, did a Master's in Work, Organisation & Health Psychology at Radboud, and ended up in Australia on a working holiday — landed 26 August 2017, two days before my 30th birthday. I've been here since. To stay, I had to do 88 days of regional work, and I did mine as a ringer on cattle stations in the NT and Queensland: mustering on horseback, quads and motorbikes, fencing, feedlot. The weeks ran to 91 hours. After that I worked in a shipping-container yard, then twisted balloons at kids' parties. None of that was the plan, but plans are mostly fiction.

The DR650 year

Somewhere in the visa years I bought a Suzuki DR650 and rode around the country solo. Uluru, Coober Pedy, a string of abandoned WWII airstrips where I'd just roll out the swag. Days over 1,000 km, about 34,000 km in total. Somewhere in there I picked up a baby kangaroo whose mother had been hit, kept it fed through the night, and put up a video that did the rounds. On another night the bike died near Wolf Creek, the dingoes started up at sundown, and I lay in the swag listening to a Stephen King audiobook. Exactly as cinematic and as uncomfortable as it sounds. A couple of years later my partner and I did a two-month WA trip on two bikes — the softer sequel.

A few years in the factory, then the hill

After the riding I became the "innovator" at a glamping-accommodation manufacturer: drafting, CNC design, sales, tech. I could quote Australian Standards in my sleep. Colleagues called me the Swiss Army Knife, which is a polite way of saying I never sat in one box. Late 2022 my partner and I bought a 16-hectare hilltop in Beecher, in the Gladstone region: two dwellings, a patch of remnant dry rainforest, an NBN tower in the corner, and enough bushfire, biodiversity and steep-land overlays to keep council busy for years. I cleaned water tanks, installed a kitchen, and started sketching an off-grid glamping resort built from shipping containers. I call it Glamtainers. The name is daggy. I like it.

Why this site exists

The calculators started because I kept hitting the same problems on my own block: water yield, solar sizing, battery autonomy, what council would actually let me build. Commercial software for this is pricey and usually assumes flat suburban blocks. Mine isn't flat and I don't live in a suburb. So I built the calculators I wished already existed — twelve of them, all interlinked — plus a map-based site planner, more than 750 guides, and an Australian gear shop that keeps the lights on through affiliate links.

Who actually builds this

OffGrid Masterplan is free, no signup, no email, no pop-up asking you to "join the tribe". One bloke runs it: me, plus a stack of AI tools I use openly. I research and edit every article by hand; the drafting gets AI assistance. The bylines on the articles are deliberately declared editorial personas — "pretend humans", each with a public inception date in their author note. That's a joke I'd rather tell you about than have you find later and feel daft.

I'm a learner-builder. I converted a 1963 Hanomag-Henschel fire truck into a motorhome. I built my own 3D printer in 2016. I weld, I fix engines. None of that makes me an engineer, an electrician or a certifier.