How to drill your own water well
drillyourownwell.com
drillyourownwell.com
(1984) https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/d...
> Some people ... got their rig stuck three different times in their first well! As they wrote, “We recognize that many of our problems are due to our inexperience …. But our inexperience is not much different from yours.”
They have many other articles on the subject; but I'm fond of linking to this one in particular.
I helped dig that well. And several others. The fellow in the middle of the picture there is my dad.
Using the gantry rig pictured in the article was much easier than just the engine unit (much like a post hole digger they sell in stores now). One of our crew was a gifted machinist who ran that up after we bent the several pipes trying to dig without bracing.
I honestly don’t think I’d have that level of determination unless I was truly desperate.
Article (in Polish but there's pics): https://darmowyporadnik.pl/artykul/36/budownictwo/kopanie-st...
Edit: Or maybe I should say "it was" - most new wells are just a vertical steel pipe with a submerged electric pump rather than big concrete rings. These are obviously much more convenient and safer.
TL;DR: lawns in the US do not need any resources. It is "perfect lawns" that need a lot of resources.
Another is Perennial Ryegrass - Lolium perenne - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolium_perenne .
A third is the common bent - Agrostis capillaris - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agrostis_capillaris .
Places like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gaeltacht_Park,_Whitehall... are the closest I've really seen to US suburbia, and it's always been within walking distance of a food shop.
Single family homes are both expensive and uncommon as land is generally more of a premium.
In France, terraced homes are rather uncommon outside the North close to Belgium, and old city centers. In fact, I don't even know if we have a name for detached houses, as far as I know they're just called "a house" while a terraced house is a "city house".
So I don't have the numbers for all of the EU but I don't think most homes are actually terraced homes in the EU.
And people do have grass lawns, but only where grass actually grows without too much care needed. Where I come from on the coast grass doesn't grow well on the sandy ground and lawns are uncommon, but a few kilometres inland if you don't do anything you get a mostly-grass lawn, with a lot of clover, daisies and often orchids growing in it.
Wow, sounds large. But fitting dropped word for such a big generalization.
Watering the lawn is just a waste of water, period. Ground water is commonly used as the primary source of drinking water, so even if the water is being extracted from a well, it is pretty much drinking water.
If the groundwater is not potable because of e.g. arsenic or pesticide contamination, I think that homeowners are usually aware of that and therefore are more likely to use the water only for washing purposes.
The HOA where the condo is has an on-site water sanitation facility which recycles toilet, shower, sink water.
They don’t consider the recycled water potable, but I guess they consider it safe enough for watering plants, for re-use in toilet water, etc.
TLDR: in the above case, it’s bacterial risk or the use of a water sanitization facility that doesn’t provide guarantee around portability.
My earlier comment was motivated by a concern that tapping a non-potable water source for one’s own family might bear health risks without more analysis of the state of that water. For all you know, even if you only use that water for plants, maybe you’re growing food with water high in arsenic and it’s accumulating in the food.
Well digging is still going strong - actually stronger, since people are now digging deeper wells as the water table is shrinking.
I have heard villagers in Spain and Italy complaining about the same thing, so I assumed there was a new loi communitaire.
https://sip.lex.pl/akty-prawne/dzu-dziennik-ustaw/utrzymanie...
Not trying to ignore your point, I am aware gmina might try and force their own solutions without respect to the more general law (there's been cases resolved in favor of the common people in the past). If you have any more details why you absolutely have to connect to the municipal sewage system please let me know.
Don't risk it. Confined spaces are dangerous.
Would you suggest we stop digging basements?
There are far more issues with just walking outside, lightning strikes hitting people, are more common.
Find me the evidence and I'll admit that my new law is invalid. :)
I won't rule out the possibility of an ankle sprain.
500 gallons of water here in Himalayan foothills.
For each ring deeper, do you dig out under the bottom ring until it slides down and another can be added to the top of the stack? That sounds terrifying having a whole stack of concrete shifting around above you.
In historic well digging the walls needed to be secured with wooden planks or bricks and such after digging straight down. Huge risk of the walls falling in. This was a problem just generations ago... And all of the family had stories of grandfather's digging wells that collapsed and that the historic approach was dangerous.
With concrete rings, there is no danger of collapsing. And certainly, when placing a ring, noone should be standing inside!
But yes... - It becomes a little claustrophobic when this becomes deep. I stopped at 4.5m and got used to it by the time we came that deep. - I put a pipe in to blow fresh air to the bottom. This helps with the uneasy feeling of a possible bad smell - there is a risk of dropping a bucket on the head. Use a proper rope, a proper knot, a proper bucket made for lifting and stop when the guy above needs a break
When I was a kid I used to go to sleep listening to stories of my dad and his dad driving around on a 2 ton truck with a 3 ton drill and how the brakes always went out. Somehow they always lived to tell the tale.
Haven't thought about this in a long time. Good memories.
Kinda like acupuncture - does my pulse really have seven levels that mean different things? I doubt it.. but a successful acupuncturist might still be able to diagnose "what hurts" using said technique, when really they've already picked up on other clues from your gait, posture, etc.
"subliminal" and "subconscious" are over-used and vague words, but we've all had the experience of wearing a new clothing item and receiving an uncommon number of compliments, including from strangers who wouldn't know it's new. I've always assumed we are unconsciously presenting the new thing with a bit of flair, and that equally-unconsciously draws the eye.
Also, you bought it because it looked good, didn't you?
To your second point: yes, of course. But three weeks later it looks (mostly) the same but stops drawing compliments.
The wikipedia page lists quite a few scientific studies that establish this. The net summary is:
The scientific evidence shows that dowsing is no more effective than random chance. It is therefore regarded as a pseudoscience.
Does the dowsing find water hidden in a random spot or is the dowser tapping into subconscious knowledge about the land to find it. The parent is talking about the latter.
Look up "Ideomotor phenomenon" in your source. It's right above the pseudoscience bit.
There's no evidence that the dowser is tapping into subconscious knowledge in a way that gives results any better than - or different from - chance.
There's water almost everywhere in the ground -- the questions are is there enough of it to meet the need? is it usable (ie: not contaminated with salt or toxic chemicals)?
In Arizona?
Others would say "A fool and his money are soon parted".
if you are within 100 miles of a natural body of water, or in a flood plain, or anywhere that it rains semi-regularly, drilling will get you to a source of water.
there's no magic or divination involved.
I do not recall whether the magical approach was any more successful than the traditional approach.
We were looking for a water pipe, not just sitting groundwater. The only explanation I could come up with was that for some reason a magnetic field was being created by the pipe underground. I don't remember if the water was flowing or not when we did it.
I feel silly even commenting this, but we truly did find the pipe exactly where I was standing when the rods pointed together.
Of course it's very possible that I unconsciously tilted my hands in the spot where I suspected the pipe would be. Even though I did make a conscious effort to not do exactly that, I wonder if there is some psychological factor in the phenomenon.
Feynman put it this way: The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.
Of course, this tells nothing about well-witching, but illustrates that at least some old beliefs aren't as unreasonable as one might think.
The claims of astrologers are not at all like this. They are vastly more specific.
In The Republic of Plato, there's this idea of rotation between political regimes[0], and it's explained by the way each generation treats the next one. Down to Earth example: think of overprotecting parents making their child unprepared for an ordinary adult life.
Now of course, this is again distant from the discourse of our favorite astrologers, but if you squint a little, there are conceptual similarities.
Thinking about it a little more, and on point to your original remark, I wonder if the fact that a considerable amount of people like to believe in astrology isn't tied to the same instinct that made old people personify everything and anything as Gods: a strong tendency to see order and intelligence in chaos.
After all, science is still about doing just this, minus the anthropomorphism. So, not so shocking: just human nature at works.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_(Plato)#Book_VIII%E2%...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroscience_of_religion
I first learned about the link between temporal lobe epilepsy and hyperreligiosity from Robert Sapolsky's Biology and Human Behavior. From your comments I think you'd find it as interesting as I did.
Thanks!
Must just be a coincidence that it's back-to-school season and everyone is transitioning out of their summer routines into school-mode.
Waking back and forth across the front lawn the bent coat hangers crossed consistently along a line so he started digging. Unfortunately the pipe he holed with the garden fork was the gas supply and the day ended with the gas company coming around to patch the line. I don’t think we ever found the water stopcock.
Though we can’t explain it dowsing does seem to work. There is however no guarantee that what you find is what you were looking for…
"I can't guarantee we'll hit water there" he said.
"I paying you. Just drill where I said" I said.
And of course we hit water.
I didn't stop to ask, but it wasn't a locate antenna (I am familiar with those, and he didn't have any wires or electronic equipment on him).
I was pretty surprised they were messing around with dowsing, knowing it's scientifically unproven/disproven.
Then again, people still use lie detectors and chiropractics.
That's not woo woo or some kind of super power. That's simply having the experience of having dug a deep hole in the ground a few times.
According to some sources I found:
- You need to request a permit from your city and your canton's water and sewage department
- To get a permit, you need a "proof of utility", so you can't just dig a well for fun, it needs to bring some benefit.
- You need a written technical planning document as well, including an analysis on the energy- and cost-efficiency of your project
- If you want to drill down to the groundwater (for drinking water quality), you need additional analyses being done, to prove that the project conforms to standards and causes no harm.
It sure sounds fun to have your own well, but I think I'll stick to collecting rain water.
I'm joking ofcourse, but not 100%
The proper comparison is looking at what it takes to do it for yourself or a friend. Of that list, that's probably just permit/inspection, which is hard to talk about generally because it's going to vary per locale. Although you really do want the backhoe.
[0] just spitballing an example, worker injury insurance could be provided more by the state from the general fund.
Where homeowners become conflicted is that well gives them the rights to domestic use and to water a basic yard, but nothing beyond that. You are quickly in to "water rights" which can become complex and limiting. More and more we are seeing water masters (a state role) take away rights from landowners who are not fully using their water rights. For example, if the land was previously farmed but has now gone fallow and the water right has not been used, the state will revoke it - and there's a 0.0% chance of ever getting it back. This sometimes leads to cases where people (farmers) overuse their water to ensure they are demonstrating usage, but then of course that can lead to fines for overuse. No question water is going to be a defining issue in the American west for the foreseeable future.
More specifically, around 1981 my Dad rented a drilling rig to supply the irrigation pump for our yard in Miami.
See, the city was phasing out septic systems, and had installed sewers to our neighborhood. They charged for sewer based on water consumed. By drilling a well he could avoid paying sewage fees for irrigation water.
I think he hit water at 8 feet, and put the well down to 12. This was Miami.
It also drilled through some limestone.
That's good advice for almost all tools. The average weekend warrior may never have been to their local tool rental shop, but it's worth checking out! You can rent just about anything, for very reasonable prices, and it tends to be pretty high quality/industrial stuff. For all the tools you only use one a year, it probably makes more financial sense to rent than buy.
that heavily depends on the kind of tool and what the likelihood of you using this thing more than twice a year is. A chainsaw, drill, jetwash - very reasonable. Anything more specialiced, you're usually better off renting - especially as one could often use the instructions provided by the experts.
When the water table is shallow, but deeper than your Louboutins - which is much of Florida - you can drill a well yourself, at low cost.
After all, the technique only works for down to about 20 feet (there's another page on how to extend that to 30 feet), and 7 of the 26 listed success stories are from Florida.
Bonus: it spurs you to think about conservation. When your 3-month wastewater averaging period starts, you know that any water you save will cut costs for the whole year.
The first step was to find the location and park the drilling rig so it wouldn't sink once the well was dug. Then you'd raise the drill arm, attach a section of pipe and the drill head. You'd lower it down into a round flange that had an opening to one side where all of the cuttings blew out. My job was to shovel the cuttings into a trench to direct water flow once you hit the water line. It was critical to keep water from getting under the tires of the rig.
Each section of pipe is 20 feet long and as you drill in you detach the rig head, raise it, get another section of pipe from a rotating carousel and then start grinding again. Once done you pull all the pipe by basically doing the reverse and then perform a similar operation to push casing down into the hole. When the rig pulls away you have a round hole in the ground ready to have another truck come in to insert an electric pump with all the wiring. Then you box everything up at the top and say job done.
Oil field drilling is pretty similar as well but the rigs are vastly larger and move way more earth much faster. My dad worked on a rough necking crew and I've been exposed to the oil and gas industry most of my life so this is an interesting tangent.
I switched from using low-volume water sources to a 1.5HP well pump pulling from a swimming pool. The pool would empty in about 20 minutes, and I would then have to wait for it to refill from a regular hose. However, while this very high water volume was able to clear the pebbles (which is how I know the floor of the hole was covered with pebbles at all, it was maybe 12 feet down at that point), there was diminishing returns and eventually the pebbles no longer cleared the top.
I'm sure I was doing something completely wrong, in the end if you have sandy/silty/clay soil you can just buy a sand point (aka driven point) and sledgehammer it down as deep as you need to go. It's a lot more heavy labor but it is also almost certain to work.
Well point is NOT easy.
> Hell most of the licensed contractors I hire (electric, plumbing, etc) don’t bother to pull permits, even for new work.
Yeah, it’s your responsibility as a homeowner to get the permit (either get it yourself or see that the contractor does). Even if you don’t think the permit inspectors are doing anything in terms of quality control, the permit helps you to pass inspections as part of the sale process and will limit your insurance exposure if there’s ever an issue. There’s probably fine print in your insurance contract saying that all work shall be permitted as required.
(Well/septic tend to get more scrutiny at a sale but the status of old renovations/remodels in general are often pretty opaque.)
If too many people start doing it, it becomes an issue of overdrawing groundwater. This leads to an arms race of digging ever deeper wells to reach the remaining groundwater, and on top of that starts leading to ground subsidence as ground formerly full of water dries out and compacts.
Off the top of my head, there is massive groundwater subsidence in the Central Valley of California, Mexico City, and Jakarta due to this issue, at rates measured in feet per year. This makes the land prone to flooding, and also damages buildings and infrastructure since the subsidence is generally not evenly spread out.
But we also have a 13k liter cistern and with drip irrigation it holds reasonably long.
On property they “own”.
You’re literally asking the states permission to have the basic things needed for human survival- shelter, food, and water.
While this makes sense to me for a business or an organisation, it strikes me as unconscionable for a private individual to have to get permission from the state to survive.
Ownership that is regulate and enforced by the state; if you own it according to the rules, you use it according to the rules. If you want to do something else, you can step outside the rules and best of luck to you.
This is why I cannot understand how the 'sovereign citizen' nonsense is at all appealing to anybody. If I'm my own boss and not morally subject to society's rules, how is it not fair game then for society to completely ignore my desires and needs? Like, ok, lets say our courts have no jurisdiction over you, but then it also follows that we can just shoot you dead where you stand and move on with our society. I get that it feels unfair to be born into rules you didn't agree to, but a second's reflection makes it obvious the other alternative is not at all a good one.
Best I can tell, it already does this. Not saying I believe the lunatic sovereign citizen horseshit, about how if they spell my name in all uppercase letters on the paperwork, I'm not subject to courts of law...
But yeh, they're definitely completely ignoring my desires and needs. Yours too. Some people are just slow to catch on.
Indeed, but you need a permit for a lot of things contained within your property too. Technically, I need a permit to change my front door. Kinda silly, mostly ignored by people, which is probably a worse outcome.
Building codes are a big reason we don't have nearly as many events called "the great fire of [city]" in the 21st century.
It would be nice to be free of the state. But how do we deal with the Tragedy of the Commons? How do we make hidden externalities visible & accurately priced?
It seems like the population is too high in most places to be able to tolerate people doing their own thing, with their own property. Not sustainable unfortunately.
At this point, "private ownership" is fading away. Eventually, maybe a hundred of years from now, we'll all be leasing our land from the government, and perhaps even leasing our privileges.
We do (pretend to do) when it's easy enough. But mostly we don't. Some examples:
- (micro)plastic pollution
- climate change (greenhouse gases)
- deforestation
- biodiversity loss
- overfishing, bycatch
We even subsidize the sectors causing most of the damage. But for for a regular joe wanting to have water ... sure, that's easy enough.
Existence itself is an externality, since everything any living organism does affects every other living organism, however minutely. There probably exists some amount of externalities that we have to choose to ignore.
Local city allows chickens (just a few) and out by me some towns allow a lot more, but there's also proper space to do those things.
Pig farm guy was right on the border and he did NOT have enough space for a bunch of pigs. Thankfully the town already had rules about pigs. Pig farms STINK.
One book that covers the history of water projects in the US is Cadillac Desert [0]. We have this cultural myth that all we need is a little more water to make the desert bloom. And as a country, we've wasted trillions of dollars diverting rivers for agricultural use. Agricultural users of water pay almost nothing for their water while using enormous amounts of taxpayer funding to do so. Utah and Arizona have recently had droughts where water consumption by private citizens was limited.
There are several crops that use enormous amounts of water, the one receiving attention is alfalfa. 82% of Utah's water is consumed by agriculture. The UT governor owns a farm that grows alfalfa for export. Instead of cutting back on his own farm's water consumption, he's been on radio & TV telling Utahns to pray for rain. Arizona has had some recent news stories about Saudi companies growing alfalfa in AZ and exporting the hay to Saudi Arabia. Alfalfa consumes so much water that growing it in Saudi Arabia is illegal. Amusingly, `alfalfa` is an Arabic word. The issue with AZ & UT is that there is plenty of taxpayer subsidized water to grow alfalfa for export while simultaneously rationing residential water consumption.
0 - https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing...
I’d actually be all in favor, except that the rate for non-agricultural users seems to be over 10x the rate for agricultural users.
There are hand operated drills, 150mm diameter with extension rods up to 10-15m long. If it works for your soil, then this is less messy.
I went with digging and a different type of dug well "Schachtbrunnen". I laid a pre-fabricated concrete ring on the ground and started digging inside until it sank into the ground. When it was level, I put the next ring on top. No special tool needed, a shovel, a bucket, some rope, patience and certainly a permit.
I went with an inner diameter of 1m, this is fine for a small shovel, a pump, a small jackhammer.
Concrete rings are used all the time in road construction work. I don't see a risk of collapse with those when stacking carefully. Even if one ring were to get a crack, where should it go? I felt safe in this regard
(Neither of these things is expensive.)
I'm not sure I agree that there is a risk then, but let's at least be fair to the argument.
Local law may require barriers to prevent this, such as an elevated concrete pad at the top of the well. This how-to guide didn't mention anything like that. Permits help ensure that important steps aren't skipped.
The thing to be aware of is that there's a few different kinds of additives you might need for well water.
The most usual is water softener. Ours isn't too hard, but what we do have is hydrogen sulphate from bacteria in the soil - it requires hydrogen peroxide to make the water smell neutral and palatable.
To the other guy - we drink the well water. It's fine after the peroxide treatment.
> It is great for saving money on watering your lawn and irrigating a garden.
Off topic: as a non native English speaker, the title made me pause. As in, why would I want to drill my water and do it well?… oh, water well, right.
This particular method of drilling a well works in sandy soil or clay where the water table isn't very deep. If you're in mountains or on any topology with bedrock you'll need better equipment, particularly a carbide or diamond tipped bit. And you'll be drilling potentially hundreds of feet. Something like this would most certainly not work in Colorado, it would probably work in Florida or Louisiana.
You can sometimes work around this by installing filters (RO and otherwise), and UV lights. However you need lab results to tell you what filters to install, and you need to keep those filters maintained.
https://waterfilterguru.com/is-it-legal-to-drill-your-own-we...
Shrinking aquifers and neighbors drilling wells just a bit deeper than their neighbor's wells have contributed to a long-standing conflict over water access, see Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner for the historical origins of conflicts.
"Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting!" - Mark Twain
You tapping in one of these wells means very little in the context of this important topic.
And collection at spring source from water bottling companies let's please not forget that environmental abuse.
Not all aquifers start underground.
But, this lead me to think, is non rock ground frequent in urbanized area? Is rock ground like my place more like the exception? I'm used to it so I thought it was the norm, but I guess it is not.
There's a (university research group?) called WOT that uploads videos to Youtube with different low cost/low tech techniques, my favorite one being with a hand drill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQRhsoSCXvg
this guy has me convinced that i can drill my own well.
i don't need to drill my own well, but if i ever do, i am sure that i can do it, now.
For one, you need to have an open mind, but be careful to not your brain fall off (https://youtu.be/RFO6ZhUW38w?si=1Snzh3lhFJ6d381g&t=12)
Then, we were very much interested in seeing these unusual things happening. As I mentioned it in a previous comment, I declared at the radio that I would immediately switch my PhD topic (in physics) to study them. Because, you know, Nobel prize. I did not get to see anything unusual, did a uneventful PhD and, well, do not have said Nobel prize.
But the important thing was: I wanted to measure. To have an experiment where what was unusual would be measurable. This means that tests with well diggers were a complete failure when they were asked to find water in controlled conditions.
OTOH, they were good when in the wild because (probably) they could read the landscape and see signs of water (conscientiously or not).
Same with homeopathy: when I have a headache I get an aspirin and before it had time to reach my stomach I feel better. I also once swam away from what I thought were sharks and I probably broke a swimming record because my arms were moving like a blender.
This is to say that scientists do not limi themselves - they just want to see and measure something to say that this is a thing. Unfortunately as soon as they do it the whole paranormal things fall apart. But we are still hoping.
https://waterdata.usgs.gov/ca/nwis/current/?type=gw
Oddly a bunch of counties are missing from the results, despite USGS appearing to have some data.
My concern here is ground water will have septic contamination, don't know if that's stupid or not.
Hand dug wells are fun to watch on TikTok, most on the tag are old ones, but a few are people digging them - https://www.tiktok.com/tag/handdug%20well
This one scared the shit out of me - https://www.tiktok.com/@smithalayamrajeev/video/723999758509...
I was looking at this Polish Company selling augers, but I checked local bore records and they were 80m for the aquifer and they were hitting rock pretty quickly in their samples even if I went for ground water - https://www.ebay.com/str/drillpartnerofficialstore
It isn't stupid concern for drinking water. You could have neighbours with septic tanks leaking, cesspools or using crazy amounts of roundup for their lawn.
But for watering flowers, washing and cleaning ground water is usually OK. You can always make a test of water quality at local authority...
Aquifier water is of good quality but getting to it might be expensive.
Note that I said most dirt above. There are types of soil that act more like pipes and so raw sewage from a leaking septic system has been found many miles away. Check with a local expert to see what soil you have to deal with.
It's not just that, dug and shallow wells are also getting surface water run-off -- basically anything on the ground in the immediate area or uphill. There's actually an acronym for this: GWUDI (Groundwater under the direct influence [of surface water]). They're highly susceptible to seasonal changes and rain. The worst ones are people that in a lower-lying area than nearby farms -- nitrates (from animal feces and fertilizers) and pesticides are all extremely expensive to remove from water.
When you do a drilled well, the annular space (the hole around the casing) actually has to be sealed (with bentonite) to prevent surface water from getting directly into the well and aquifer. I see no mention of this in the article.
Where I live (Ontario Canada) there are environmental laws protecting ground water. Badly done wells can actually contaminate a huge area and affect other people's wells and drinking water.