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How to drill your own water well

drillyourownwell.com

91–100 of 233 posts

Re: How to drill your own water well

#91
post #90

The house I live in has a well. 400 feet deep (why? long story). 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.

Where do you add that? into the water softener?

Re: How to drill your own water well

#92
post #90

The house I live in has a well. 400 feet deep (why? long story). 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.

Why do you need any conditioning for irrigation water?

Re: How to drill your own water well

#94
post #41

In Poland it's quite common for people to just hand dig their wells, using concrete rings for the reinforcement of walls. It's legal up to 30 meters depth and up to 5 m^3/day water yield. 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 bi…

With the recent legislation that every Polish village has to be connected to water and sewage even if the homeowner wanted to remain off-grid, I would expect not expect well-digging to remain popular.

You could bypass that with a domestic wastewater treatment plant.

Re: How to drill your own water well

#95
Site must have received an HN hug of death, so not sure what method it reccomends.

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

Re: How to drill your own water well

#96
post #31
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will likely have issues if you ever try to sell property with an unpermitted well. FHA loans have restrictions on the well as do many local jurisdictions that may refuse to convey the property if the well isn’t up to code. My local jurisdiction won’t block the sale but will write an alarming letter to the seller. In the case of a new build or major remodel, you will not be able to get a certificate of occupancy w…

Yeah, it doesn't take a genius inspector to take the as built plans, the list of work permits, and see if that explains current state of the house. And then there's the whole issue of mandatory disclosure forms and how forthcoming you are on those and if whatever you put down aligns with the inspectors find.

That assumes there are as built plans. I live in an area of the US with a lot of old houses and there certainly aren't as built plans for 100-200+ year old houses or a string of permits for any substantial work.

(Well/septic tend to get more scrutiny at a sale but the status of old renovations/remodels in general are often pretty opaque.)

Re: How to drill your own water well

#97

I tried to use this to drill a well some years ago on the west coast of Florida near the ocean. Worked great through the sand about 20 feet. Then we hit a shale deposit. There was no getting through it. Some pro well drillers came and couldn't make it through either. The neighbor drilled his own well a couple years prior and told us the secret. Blasting caps. We gave up.

The good news is that the shale was determined to be frackable, so you were able to sell hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil and drive to Beverly Hills in your ancient jalopy

Re: How to drill your own water well

#98
post #90

The house I live in has a well. 400 feet deep (why? long story). 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.

Water softeners are common, but they are regional. In some places the ground water is naturally soft and you don't need one. In others you need them. One house I lived in you needed an iron filter, but most people have never heard of such a thing There are lots of other devices in the water treatment catalog that you might or might not need. Only a real water test can tell.

Re: How to drill your own water well

#99
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is terrible, but the same thing can happen in a basement, and even has happened in low laying areas of land. Would you suggest we stop digging basements? There are far more issues with just walking outside, lightning strikes hitting people, are more common.

I'm going to declare a new law, a la Bettredge's Law: "When a small probability is claimed, without evidence, to be less than that of death by lightening strikes, it is safe to assume the small probability is in fact higher than the risk of death by lightening strikes". Find me the evidence and I'll admit that my new law is invalid. :)

I don't need evidence to know that the odds of casualties falling into a modern well (that is a few inches in diameter) such as the one being drilled here are less than being hit by lightning (assuming lightning is possible).

I won't rule out the possibility of an ankle sprain.

Re: How to drill your own water well

#100
post #22

Is this for drinking water? And what depths can be reached with this method? I wish these were stated more clearly; I’m guessing “not drinking”, based on: > 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.

They state it is for irrigation only. You can use the same technique for drinking water in some places, but it really depends on local soil conditions (meaning even if your neighbor has safe water you might not get safe water!) and the care taking when drilling the well. If you do try this, after drilling and sealing the well you chlorinate the water (to kill anything you introduced), wait a week, then have a proper lab test, if the lab says it is safe to drink you are fine. The lab test should be repeated every 3 months (almost nobody does, but that is what the labs tell you)

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.

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