Dig Your Own Well.

With a few simple tools, you can dig a well. In my area the water table is pretty high. 10 to 15 foot well can be turned by hand in a couple hours. It is possible to source all the water you can pump by hand to fill your needs. Clean & potable straight from the ground. Of course the depth you need is dependent on your aquifer. BUT you can do it yourself.
This is old school low tech. Google many many resources on this. Enjoy

http://www.rural-water-supply.net/e...an-introduction-to-hand-dug-and-drilled-wells

 

An already established well will be priceless when SHTF. Also, having the knowledge that it is possible for you to create one of your most precious resources. We have 3 wells on own property, all powered by electric pumps. I'm working on a hand pump solution & possible solar setup so I can easily use whatever power source that is available when things go bad.

 

My father in law dug their water well with an auger type post hole digger. It was 25 feet deep and where they lived it never ran dry. You just dig the hole then push a pipe down into the hole. Once you have that pipe down you put another smaller pipe into ti and blow a reservoir with air and water. You pump it down under pressure and it will blow and wash dirt out the top of the casing. This will enlarge the place where the water has to soak in and allows larger volumes to be used.

For a pure drinking water type well you can skip this to some extent. A friend an I did this. When we put down the casing it was 4" PVC pipe. The bottom joints were perforated. It worked fine to water a garden and provide drinking water for one house.

I was raised 9ft/2.75m above sea level. My Father in law lived 6ft/1.8m above sea level. The water table was SHALLOW to say the least. Even where I live now though 150ft/45.7m above sea level water is only 35ft/10.6m down. A drinking weel doesn't have to be as big a deal as a water well for a modern home. A 4" hole with a 3" bucket will keep you going or if you do it now you can have a hand pump installed.

The bucket that I am talking about for those that have never seen one is a piece of pipe that is smaller than your casing pipe. It is usually about 5 feet/1.5m long with a little weight on bottom and a rope or cable hooked to the top. there is a hole in the bottom of it with a flapper valve that allows it to fill and sink. When you pull it up the flapper valve holds the water in. this will give you about 1 gallon of water/3.8l per bucket.

 

Like that idea TexDan, much easier to dig a 4"hydraulic bore hole then a full diameter well(won't work that well in stony ground).Unfortunately you'll probably need permission from the authorities and they may limit the depth you can go to. If everyone did it the water table would soon drop below the reach of older wells.

 

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that's why I liked TexDanm's post so much, the idea of a 3" bucket made of pipe running inside a 4" borehole pipe seems like a workable answer

 

That isn't my idea. That is a fairly common way to do it here for emergencies. Google " Drilled well bucket" You can get them in several sizes. I'm just cheap and like to make my own stuff when possible. For me PVC pipe is just big boy tinker toys and I make all manner of things with it. I got a look at a bought one and so made one that I can drop down into any 4" well. In East Texas almost every rural house has a well. As far as it having any effect on the water table that is silly. You use the water then put it back in the ground via your septic system or watering your garden or whatever. It never leaves your property either way.

 

As said, I'm working on a hand pump idea. Connect to the well & pump away. I think with a couple of check valves & pipe, I can rig up a simple piston operated by a handle.

 

I plan on making a small Drilled well bucket that will fit down any sized well without having to pull the existing pipes. A well bucket made from 1.5in/38mm pipe that was about 36 in/91.4cm long would pull up a quart/liter from any well. Around here out in the country side all places that don't have city water services have their own wells. Without power they won't be used but you can still get water from them with a small bucket. Even if you have a pump you will need water to prime the pump to start off. The nice thing about well water is that it is immediately drinkable. Most of the home sized wells here are less than a 100 feet/30.5 meters deep and many are less than 25 feet/7.62 meters. A well that is near to a river or lake is usually pretty shallow.

 

If you sketch a design or start building, post some pix

 

I had a design in my head for a pumping setup using PVC & a couple check valves. Just for giggles I Googled DIY water pump. BAM! There was a nearly identical ( in theory) hand operated pump with even homemade check valves. An improved design creates enough vacuum to prime the well & even can push pressure if desired.

I Love the Internet

 

I really want a well. I don't know if I can have one drilled here. Behind my place is a member of the local water district board. Not allowed to drill wells. I would really like to try a smaller auger. I would like to know what level the water table is at.

I saw a system once where you use a water pump. Dig out an area around where you want the well. Run the water down through the pipe and it will basically bore a hole down as long as it doesn't hit rock. I might try this one day.

 

I had s friend that did a shallow well like you are talking about. It is easy if your water table is shallow enough. Take a post hole digger and dig a starter hole. Take a 2" pipe and stand it in the hole. Take a 1" pipe and put a fitting on the end of it that you can screw a water hose on. Put the 1" pipe inside the 2" pipe and start the water running. The water coming out of the 1" pipe will wash the water out from under the 2" pipe and as it does you work the pipe down. Once it starts to seal the water will be muddy water coming up and out the top of the 2" pipe. You can slowly wash out and sink the 2" pipe deeper and deeper. When he got it down a full joint deep he rented a bigger water pump with a tank on it and blew it out with the higher pressure. This opened up a bigger reservoir at the bottom of the pipe and after that he hooked up a little shallow well pump and watered his garden for pennys.

Now you have to understand we lived about 50 miles from the Gulf Coast and were like less than 10 feet above sea level. The dirt there is deep and sandy so we didn't have any rocks or even thick layers of clay to deal with. The water table there is very shallow and easy to tap. Nonetheless this sort of technique can be scaled up or down to do the job.

 

Ok, so I didn't dig a well today, but I revived an abandoned well on my property. The original 2 inch well did not have enough flow to support a large irrigation system so a 4 inch well was drilled to replace it.
The 2 inch well was in perfect working order pulling about 4 gallons per minute. I wanted to restore this well as the first step in my DIY hand pump project. When the power goes out I can simply attach my rig & pump away.
I uncapped the well head & lowered a garden hose down under pressure to flush the pipe & get a measurement of the well depth ( 65+/- feet) then attached a half HP Jet pump. I could not get it to prime. Kept pulling air but no water.
I realized that when the well had been abandoned, the knuckle head well guy did not plug the original pump feed line. Had to dig down 4 feet to reach the Tee & capped it. Restarted the jet pump & sure enough, 4 GPM of water gushed forth. Ran it for an hour to clear any silt & the water is pristine.

 

Today's work also falls under " what have I done recently to improve my survival chances" thread.
On Friday I received a new, full set of Rifleman Molle gear so i can create a better bug out bag system. Add that to the list.

 

I've been on my Texas property for about three years. My initial hope was to have a well, but because a nearby municipality purchased the right to suck our aquifer dry, the driller wanted $20,000 to go to 800 feet.

Seemed kind of extreme to me until I heard people complaining that their 300 foot wells were going dry (for the first time ever).

I spent a paultry $3000 in comparison to connect to the municipal water line, but have 2,000 gallons of full rain collection tanks if need be.

We have had a ton of rain this past year though so I am considering digging my own shallow well to see what I get.

 

Where we live the water is literally seeping up out of the ground and running down my driveway like a creek. It has shown up a few times in the past but it has been almost constant since Harvey. We didn't get the 5 feet of water but we did get 3 feet and it has just never dried out. The Trinity river has been flooding for months and months. We also have a 1500 gallon cistern that collects rain water off out roof but I'm thinking about digging a water well just as a back up. A 4" well is pretty easy to put in yourself if it is shallow and a 4" well bucket will provide all the clean water you need.

 

I have a question about well water.
When I was a kid we had well water, and how did it get in the house? By a pump. If you are not situated with the means to access your well water, how are you going to get your well water? So, I found stuff to read online elsewhere but this thread is a great resource and answers that question.
I'm trying to understand this and read some stuff on Popular Mechanics.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/home/how-to/a152/1275136/

Also, so many of you are talking about going to the mountains, or Arkansas. I'm wondering how you're going to dig your well with all that rock everywhere, mountains or Arkansas.

 

I like this well idea. I wonder if you could just dig to the point of water and then stop. It's just a hole in the background until you hit water, right? I would just get the gas lines and electrical lines market off and then start digging... "for exercise."