Deepen Old Well? - Drill New Well?

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I live in northeastern Ohio and have a well that is 67 feet deep that goes through layers of shale and sandstone. It is a sweet well, but the flow rate forces me to make choices about who showers when, or do you do the laundry, etc. I would like to go deeper, but I'm terrified about hitting an iron or sulpher pocket and ruining the well for drinking water. Surrounding wells are about as deep as mine so it is hard to say what lies deeper in the water table.

I could drill a completely new well, but that means incurring the expense of starting at the top. Ideas?

Craig Miller

-- Craig Miller (CMiller@ssd.com), May 09, 2000

Answers

You may well be right to worry if other wells in the area are about the same depth as yours. Or it may just be that they are able to get enough flow (or deal with the lower flow) and haven't felt the need to go deeper. I'd ask around some more and try to figure out why people aren't going deeper.

Do you have a pressure tank? If you do can you put in a bigger one or a second one? Have you considered pumping through the night into one or more tanks to have plenty of water during the day? Can you add rain water to the mix? My husband's grandmother refused to use rural water for anything but the toilet that she never used anyway. She used only rain water.

One upside of not having enough water is it forces you to conserve and also forces the spacing of activities such as showering and clothes washing which gives your septic system a break. Gerbil

-- Gerbil (ima_gerbil@hotmail.com), May 09, 2000.


You might also ask a well-driller about hydro-fracturing the well. That is what we had to have done to our well here. It is four hundred feet deep, and when we moved here wasn't much more than a dry hole -- we could run the well dry just by doing the dishes and the laundry on the same day. We still don't have a LOT of water, but it is much better than it was. Hydro-fracturing involves forcing water into the well at high pressure and opening up the seams at the bottom (hopefully)to allow more water to flow into the well. I guess it doesn't always work but it did help us. The storage tank is a very good idea -- there is a thread (maybe two) on this forum about cisterns.

-- Kathleen (stonycft@hotmail.com), May 09, 2000.

I agree with Gerbil. We use rain-water only - 23" per annum - off house and shed roofs. We store it in an underground tank (cistern), then used to pump it up to an overhead tank until that rusted out. I'll do that again when I build my own place - overhead tank gives even pressure, and it still works even when the power's off. We still have an overhead tank for water from the earthen dam (muddy) - pumped by windmill - which is used for the garden, and for septic toilet.

-- Don Armstrong (darmst@yahoo.com.au), May 10, 2000.

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