Building a house on an artesian well?

[JB4310]

The water table is usually not 2 feet down :laughing: but it is not real deep. My parents well has the pump on the surface not down in the well so I do not think the their well is that deep. But it is deeper than 2 feet.
Later,
Dan

Yeah I guess that was an exaggerasion That comes partly from my 85 year old mother who has a house near Sebastian inlet.

She also thinks that if any more people move to FL, the peninsula is gonna break off the mainland :laughing: I better take her geo observastions with a grain of salt.

JB.

 

[Egon]

Welcome justwater.:thumbsup:

Sounds like reasonable advice you have given.

 

[justwater]

Nice, mother nature at it's best.

If it's cased so far down, sounds like there is no chance of leaking up around the pipe. Couldn't you go down 10 feet and come off with a 90 or 45 and bring it up out side the homes foot print?

Being in FL, how deep are your footings for slab construction? if any.

JB.

thanks for the welcome egon.

sorry if i get carried away and write a book.

jb, i cant speak for depth of the slab footings as i have no clue. as far as "moving the well", technically it is illegal for florida well heads to be buried, so a house over it is out of the question. you have to be able to access an open well.

If several several drillers (groundwater contractors), and the SJRWMD (st. johns river water management district) claimed that it was perfectly fine so long as it was properly abandoned.. .and your contractor is still questioning it for whatever reason, i would likely tell him to go kick rocks. jacksonville has many starving contractors that would love to build that house.

a well like this is fully cased all the way to the limerock, then drilled into the limerock which is where the water and pressure comes from. it aint like jed shot the ground and water came up, these wells are fairly deep. if you pump concrete into the limerock and up to the top of the casing, there is 0 chance that water could ever be a problem later.

i hope the OP doesnt get scared to put the home in a desired location because of misinformation. i would hate for you to move the home and always wish it had been in the original location. no one is of more help in this situation than the local well drillers, and especially SJRWMD. btw, this would not be the first house built over a plugged artesian well in florida.

but if it doesnt bother you one bit and you do choose to move the home, awesome.. you likely saved yourself 8-12k$ between plugging the old well and drilling a new artesian well.

good luck with whatever you decide.

 

[sandman2234]

I just re-read my post, and wanted to edit some left out sentnce parts, where my thought process got ahead of my typing skills on a phone keypad.
I mistaked saying all land in Florida was deemed swampland, but instead meant to say that too many people think that Florida is all swampland, where it isn't and I went on to discribe a hole I dug in my backyard.
As far as the million dollar house, I left out out a major piece of information, in that the house was built on top of a well that was plugged, but in my opinion not the" right way". A bulldozer accidently hit the well head pipe bending it over, and breaking the top. To fix the problem of about a zillion gallons of water flowing and trying to raise the St.Johns to flow stage, the dozer flattened the pipe till it quit spewing waterr, the water was pumped out and fill was brought in to cover the washout and raise the level of the land by a couple of feet (which is probably why the brick mortar is cracking from the house settling). What will happen once the flattened pipe rusts out, if it ever does, only time will tell, but I wouldn't want to bed a million dollars on it. So if you decide that it isn't worth the efforts to save the well (or whale, lol) then proceed but don稚 cut corners in the well capping, and make sure you fully understand what has to be done and be on site to make sure it is done with no compromise. As Justwater said, it is a good chunk of change to cap and later need to redrill it, so I would "fight city hall" with your version of how you want to keep it. Every well needs a pumphouse to protect the pump and well head from freezing, so figure out SJRWM reasons and start there. I built a commercial garage behind a residental house that required ponds, but got them to finally approve it when I showed them their reasons weren't valid in my case. City of jax also became reasonable with the same method of approach.
Good luck,
David from jax

Footers for that garage were 12 deep by 20 wide, but the inspector onsite asked me what I was trying to build, a fortress?