Hey rusted nuts

I know from reading your posts that you know a thing or two about water wells. I have a question for you:

We had a well drilled about 10 years ago that turns cloudy after a rain. We were told it had surface water entering it. We spent a lot of time and money trying to fix the problem before we finally had another well drilled (New one is crystal clear and wonderful). I had one well pump guy tell me that i could extend the casing above ground and shovel sand in between the casing and well wall to make the old well safe.

Have you ever heard of that? Have you heard of any methods that I could use to save the old well?

I'm really just curious, I can't see ever using it for potable water, but we do use the old well to water the garden.

Well, In my area the 1st thing we would do is to try and find out why the water was getting cloudy after a rain. We have ran a garden hose next to the casing and all around the well while we shine a light down the well to see if water is comeing in around the casing. Sometimes surface water will come in from a fault in the bedrock, or though sand and gravel, not much you can do in that case. I don't see how sand would keep surface water out of a well, Might clear it up some, But you would still have surface water getting in there. I would extend the casing above ground a foot and a half, Dig down two feet around the casing and pour bentonite around the casing. Bentonite is a dehydrated clay, They make 2 driffent kinds that I know about, One kind swells up when it comes in contac with water, That is the kind you want

Thank you very much for the info. I'll run a hose around it and see if I can see anything. I might just go get some bentonite. You said two feet deep, but how wide should I dig away from the well?

I am not sure whether it is a fault in the bed rock or a leak around the casing. The guy that drilled the well has a reputation for poor work (wish I would have known that then!), so I suspect that the casing was not seated properly, or deep enough.

I dig a foot wide, Whole way round the casing.

If you are just using the water for irrigation, why worry about cloudiness?

If you have deep, sandy soil, it may be hard or impossible to seal a well from surface water. In my area, the well drillers install a 20 foot steel well casing in a new well, and then dump in as much bentonite around the casing as will fit. I don"t know if there is a law requiring them to do that or not. However it seems to work fine on the wells I have been around.

The well where I grew up had been punched with a cable drilling machine in about 1910. There had been a windmill, but when we moved there in the 1950"s, the well had a jet pump with a pump house built over it. We later changed over to a submersible pump. I don"t know how far the casing in that well went down, but every Spring we had problems with surface water contamination for about a month. The water would get very brown, like apple cider vinegar. It only really bothered when my Mom wanted to wash white clothes. My Dad had the brownish water tested, and the water was said to be safe to drink, so we did. After about a month or so, it would go back to being crystal clear.

We tried several things to help keep the water clear. I hand dug a ditch across a field to eliminate a puddle that would develop that was not too far from the pump house, but that did not seem to make much difference in the color of the water, usually about March.

My guess is that there were many fractures through the rock around our farmstead, and when the Spring thaw occurred, there was so much available surface water that it made its way to our aquifer. Our well was supposed to have been about 200 feet deep with way more water available than we ever had pump to test its capability. It was a good well, but it had the fairly small problem of the water getting brown for a while every Spring. We just accepted it. Good luck!