Drill your own well?

JDEM

Well-known Member
I am wondering if anyone here has ever tried, or knows of anybody who has tried something like this air-powered drill to make a water-well? I need to get a good source for water at some remote property I have in the Michigan Upper Peninsula. No rock. Sand all the way down although it gets pretty hard-packed once you get down below 5 feet. Water table is only 2 feet down right now and in the driest times about 6 feet. I already dug a well with my backhoe that is around 12 feet deep but the water is horrible. Note we are next to a bog/swamp. So I need to drill a well that only gets water from down deep enough to miss the bad surface water.

Note - I already tried driving a point like many do in the area. I am not sure what the trick is - but I gave up. I keep hammering the threads off the 1" steel pipe when I get down to 10-15 feet. That even with the so-called correct drive-caps.

Well driller - even if he could get a rig back on my land will likely want around $5000 just for a hole and a casing put in. Plus it requires a $300 well permit and up go my taxes probably.

Like I said, it is hard sand all the way down. No rock at all. I am pretty sure a well 40-50 feet would work fine.

I have a gas-powered 4" auger with enough extensions to go that deep. Just not sure if it will really work. It would take a lot of messing around coupling and uncoupling extensions and trying to get the drilled sand up and out of the hole.

I see this rig for sale on the Net. Says it cleans itself out as it goes down. In theory, sounds like it might do the job. But for $700, I want to be dead-sure this thing really works. Cannot say I ever seen one in real life.
cvphoto29302.jpg
 
When I was a kid dad dug a well with a 2? bit with 4? sections of 3/4? pipe and a T handle. He later hirer a well driller to dig a 2? well cased with concrete culverts in about the same place. Don?t remember much more.
 
chech you tube, thereare quite a few videos on home made well drilling rigs that you can make quite inexpensively.
 
Get some 4" schedule 40 plastic pipe to use as a casein, and use your power auger if the bit fits into the pipe. Just drive the pipe deeper and use connectors to lengthen it as you drill out the sand.------Loren
 
Do you have the means to wash a point in? (Trash pump and 50 to 100 gallons of water.) We've been washing them in for 25 years or so now. Once you're set up, it only takes a minute or 2 to make a 20' deep hole. Sure beats driving them in.
 
My well man drills my wells about 80 ft.
I think the uses 6 inch plastic pipe.
He uses a large pump on drilling rig to bring ground dirt and rocks out. Then he installs a fine screen near bottom to keep sand out.

Key thing is he uses a sealer to keep surface water out of aquifer.

He told me about a woman who had a shallow well in a pit. Her surface water is run off from a farmer's field. Now she has roundup in her water.

My well guy won't touch her old well. No fixing roundup in a hand dig well pit.

My last well was $2800 10 years ago.

Today same well is $3500.

Not sure if a well point on a shallow well where surface water is contaminated with chemicals used by farmers is the best way to go.

I'll leave my 4 deep wells to a 4th generation well driller.
 
That sounds interesting. I have a 5 horse gas powered water-pump with 50 feet of 2" hose as I recall. Called a "semi-trash" pump. I have access to plenty of water, just not clean. How does this work? Do I need to put some sort of nozzle on the end of the hose? It is a 200 gallon per minute pump when just moving water with no pressure. I never tried it for anything else.
 
We use a 2" pvc pipe 20' long. One end has a threaded coupler to hook to the pump, the other has triangular notches cut in it about 1/2" deep all the way around. You hook your trash pump hose to it and stand it up. It's best with 2 people on the pipe and one to start the pump. Once the water is flowing, you just push down and kind of twist it back and forth. You should be able to get all 20ft in the ground if its all sand.

Get a 1.25" plastic point and glue 2 10' sections of pipe to it(or enough to get it out of the ground depending on how far you could get the 2" pipe down). Unhook the trash pump hose from the 2" pipe. Drop the point down inside it making sure it hits bottom and pull the 2" pipe out. The point should stay put and you're good to go.

The video link kind of gives you an idea how the washing in part works. Ours around here seem to go in a little easier.
Kind of like this
 

The best way to drill your own well is to "wash" it or "hydrodrill" it. This technique uses PVC pipe and water to wash the dirt out of the hole in front of the jet of water so you can "drill" the PVC pipe into the ground.

All the info you need is right here:

https://www.drillyourownwell.com/index.htm

This technique works great as long as you can hit water within 30 or so feet. If your water table is deeper than that, than no DIY solution is going to work anyway.

Pay special attention to the part that describes using 1 inch PVC as a "test drill". 1 inch PVC goes in a lot faster and with a lot less water used to drill it in, so use 1 inch PVC first and then when you hit water, pull it out and re-drill with full size PVC down the same hole.

Even if you have to purchase totes to hold drill water and a gas powered pump to drill, this technique is still a good solution.

I plan to drill a well at my cabin next summer.

Grouse
 
Here is a pretty good video how the big boys do it. Just fun to watch. Here in south jersey it is all sand right down to bedrock. Something better than 175 feet. The irrigation wells use this same system but the aquifer is huge and water table is maybe 20 feet down in a drought. They pump several hundred gallons a minute not some little 15 a minute. Utube has a bunch of videos. Go take a look on how to do it.
Big well.
 
Washing on a well won't work at my place in the southern end of country. 3 ft down is sand angle gravel. Some gravel is larger than a soft ball.


That's why I have mine wells drilled
 

Interesting that some can hit good water so shallow.
I have 2 wells, one is 420 ft, the other is 550 but I live on top of a hill, down in the valley they can hit water at 150-200 ft.
All wells here are drilled into the rock aquifer, water above that is no good.
 
Back when I had my well drilled the guy hit water at 15 feet and started to pump the lake backwards since what he did was hit the spring that feed it. He also hit 2 or 3 caves on the way down and hit good water at 75 feet. He asked me if I wanted him to stop of go deeper and I told him go to at least 100 foot. When he was done I measured how deep the water was and it was 19.5 feet from the top of the well casing
 

Here in mid Michigan, my neighbor paid 4500 to put a well in 10 years ago. And she is cheap as hell, waited 3 months to get the cheapest guy, from a neighboring county. I would not be surprised at 6 or 7 k now.
 

I had a professional drill my well. It's got 6" casing in it. He hit water at 60 feet and went down an additional 60 feet since I told him I wanted a "good" well.

Since the well is 120 feet deep, when he put the well piping in, he kept the submersible pump 20 feet off the bottom of the well. That way I've never had any trouble with dirt or sand in the water. That was around 50 years ago and I've never had a problem with the well. Of course I'm on the third pump now but that's not bad for 50 years.

When you drill a well, you have to consider the diameter of the casing you will put in it and the depth to pump water to the surface. You'll want the biggest pump you can get in it. That's why my well is cased with 6" casing.

I think it's worth having a professional well driller do the job.
 

They use rigs like this at work to drill water sample wells or take soil samples prior to building structures .
Swamps and bogs don't seem to worry them too much.
http://www.allservicedrilling.com/web/equipment_soilmax.php
 
(quoted from post at 17:17:49 09/16/19)
They use rigs like this at work to drill water sample wells or take soil samples prior to building structures .
Swamps and bogs don't seem to worry them too much.
http://www.allservicedrilling.com/web/equipment_soilmax.php

I'll take two. I wonder if they will accept a check? :wink:
 

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