drill your own well?

[ultrarunner]

Wow... 15 gallons from a dug do it yourself well... amazing.

Yeah... just about everything is more expensive in California and a large part is the ever increasing cost of compliance...

I had the same outfit quote me in 2005 for my place and it was 10k without development... no permit needed then.

 

[paulharvey]

When I was a kid, dad hand dug a well. Used blue plastic barrels as the casing and had a pitcher pump and pipe down to the water.

 

[SPIKER]

Wow... 15 gallons from a dug do it yourself well... amazing.

Yeah... just about everything is more expensive in California and a large part is the ever increasing cost of compliance...

I had the same outfit quote me in 2005 for my place and it was 10k without development... no permit needed then.

I hear the communist republic of CA is now going to regulate water from private wells and charge people for the water they pump from under their own property#@!

That is on top of all those other rules & regulations such as no wood burning to warm your winter home or soon to be laws against cooking food over a fire or BBQ charcoal... Guess it is called land of Fruits and Nuts for a reason (were pulling for ya.)

M

 

[DelSc]

Several years ago I pounded a well point into a sandy soil with shallow water table. I think I went down 24 ft with iron pipe, and the water table was about 12 ft down. I had a hand pump and could pump a very low flow rate of water from it. I never got enough to be practical for gardening or for horses, so put in a 6 ft deep trench about 200 ft long and ran plastic pipe to a regular well and am much happier with it. The iron pipe that is 24 ft in the ground now just serves as the ground for my electric fence and it does a reasonable job with that.

 

[MossRoad]

I hear the communist republic of CA is now going to regulate water from private wells and charge people for the water they pump from under their own property#@!

That is on top of all those other rules & regulations such as no wood burning to warm your winter home or soon to be laws against cooking food over a fire or BBQ charcoal... Guess it is called land of Fruits and Nuts for a reason (were pulling for ya.)

M

Don't be so quick to jump on them. The water under your property comes from under someone else's property, and so on. One greedy user can dry up many folks' wells.

 

[flusher]

Don't be so quick to jump on them. The water under your property comes from under someone else's property, and so on. One greedy user can dry up many folks' wells.

Greedy user: don't have to be greedy users, just have desperate folks as neighbors.

My 10 acre place in Tehama County, CA (120 miles North of Sacramento) that I used to own is surrounded by orchard growers (olives, plums for prunes, almonds, English walnuts, mandarin oranges). With the drought going into the 4th year and no surface water available from the irrigation district, these growers have been pumping ground water like crazy for the past year or so to keep their trees alive. My neighbor's well at 90 ft went dry last August. My well is at 154 feet and is in the strata that gets a lot of pumping for the orchards. Won't be long before that well is in trouble if this drought continues.

Cost of drilling has gone from $21/ft in 2005 when my well was drilled to $80-100/ft now with a 6-9 month waiting period to get a crew on site. The drillers are all booked up solid putting in huge ag wells for the orchard growers.

It's getting hairy out here in No. CA. I sold my place in Jan before the water problem causes property values to tank.

 

[texasjohn]

This makes no sense...
You want to drill a well, which could be 50-many hundreds feet deep to avoid digging a three foot trench???

Is there a typo there and you really have to trench a lot farther than 3'??

As for driving a well point, it only works if you have soft soil and not rock. Rock requires drilling. For example, we have sand and can hand drive a well very easily.

exactly what I thought...even a 30 foot trench isn't out of the question at all, considering cost differential between pipe and pump components.

 

[Sawyer Rob]

I wouldn't buy any property that didn't have decent, easy to get water!!

My place has water shooting out of the ground, on it's own....no pump needed,

Fantastic cold spring water, all anyone would ever need, coming out of the ground at the rate of a thousand gallons an hour

I'm not sure why anyone would buy land that doesn't have water that's easy to get?

SR

 

[ultrarunner]

I wouldn't buy any property that didn't have decent, easy to get water!!

My place has water shooting out of the ground, on it's own....no pump needed,

Fantastic cold spring water, all anyone would ever need, coming out of the ground at the rate of a thousand gallons an hour

I'm not sure why anyone would buy land that doesn't have water that's easy to get?

SR

That would leave out some of the most productive irrigated farmland in California...

They are already saying the current condition is a first in the States 165+ history.

In addition, water policies also are a huge factor...

 

[SPIKER]

That would leave out some of the most productive irrigated farmland in California...

They are already saying the current condition is a first in the States 165+ history.

In addition, water policies also are a huge factor...

That has been part of the problem all along, the fact is much of CA has always been and should have stayed the desert. I spent a few years in SO CA high desert & wandered around a good bit. It is a nice place but anyone who thinks they can suck, pump and flow water hundreds of miles... Fact is that water is going down in underground aquifers because the pumping to flood the desert cant go on forever.

These are same people who say world is getting warmed because of humans, daa well warmer maybe. Globe is coming out of the last ice age still, earth's temp for millions of years averaged around 65 to 70F & only in the 55ave range because 10,000 years ago the ice of last 50K years finally broke. In few more thousand years average temp without humans will be about the same as with, mid 60's and increasing still... Up towards the upper temp averages of just under 70F... I dont think continuing to pump out the aquifers will matter then.

M