How to drill your own water well
drillyourownwell.com
How to drill your own water well
1–10 of 233 posts
Re: How to drill your own water well
#2This sounds like a terrible idea, along the lines of "How to perform your own knee surgery"
Re: How to drill your own water well
#3This sounds like a terrible idea, along the lines of "How to perform your own knee surgery"
Perhaps, but a really cool thing to know, and you're much less likely to hurt yourself. I enjoyed the read :)
Re: How to drill your own water well
#4This sounds like a terrible idea, along the lines of "How to perform your own knee surgery"
Its pitched as just for irrigation, not drinking water. Not nearly as dangerous as a result.
Re: How to drill your own water well
#5This sounds like a terrible idea, along the lines of "How to perform your own knee surgery"
What exactly is so terrible as long as you're willing to take a small to moderate risk of getting a PVC pipe stuck in the ground and keep in mind the presented cautions -- consider the water irrigation-only/non-potable until tested (possibly even if tested, although that's not what the site says)?
Re: How to drill your own water well
#6Probably want to read this first, particularly if you live in a western USA state:
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
Re: How to drill your own water well
#7Hella ASMR from listening to this guy
Re: How to drill your own water well
#8For folks interested in the standard process, I highly recommend this channel: https://youtube.com/@h2omechanic. Very informative.
Re: How to drill your own water well
#9"Mother Earth News" is a good resource:
(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.
Re: How to drill your own water well
#10I tried this years ago and it ended in failure. From what I learned it seems like your soil down to the level you want to drill to has to be basically 100% silt/sand/clay. In most areas there are various pebbles, some up to the the size of a dime or so, and what I found was smaller particles would wash up and out of the hole, but these pebbles would accumulate on the bottom.
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.