drilling your own water well

[ernemats]

Has anyone ever tried to drill their own water well with anything like the deeprock hydra drill ? If so how do they work in drilling stone?

 

[Bird]

My brother and I drilled a little over 80' with one at his place, but no rock and no water. We'd been told that a number of dug wells in the area were no more than 30-40' deep and they had water, even though it wasn't fit to drink, so he thought he'd have a well to water the yard and garden, but no such luck.

 

[goaliedad]

we use to own some woods property in an area of lakes- most everyone had a sand point about 30" deep, we drove a point just over 90" before hitting water. we used a "well weight"- about 30'' of 6" solid steel with a 4' long 1" rod. built a tripod over the site with a pulley. put the point on a section of pipe and started slamming away. after about 65" it would not budge- we were afraid that we had hit a rock. time to pull out the big guns- we made a capstan out of tire rims, blocked up the rear end of my dad's Impala and went back to punching away. we made slow progress, and then the pipe dropped big time. We tested often by pouring water in the pipe. once the pipe dropped you couldn't full it up. the water came up to within about 7' of the surface- good thing as we did not have power and were going to use a hand pump. after pumping out the silt and junk we had great water. we had the health department test it- they didn't know we had a hand pump. their report indicated that once it was pumped for a while it would be very safe.

it was alot of work, but sure was better than having to carry water!

 

[EastTexFrank]

That's basically how they drilled water and oil wells for years. In fact, a guy that lives pretty close just used the same method to drill a water well except that he used a cement mixer drum to retrieve his "tool" from the hole. After a lifetime in the oilfield, drilling wells all over the world, it was interesting to see this one man's ingenuity. He ended up with a good well to water all the plants and things in his nursery.

I've never know anyone who used one of those "one-man rigs". I would think that your water table would have to be fairly shallow and have no real hard rock capping it. I don't know how much water it would produce either because the fishtail bits they use look to be pretty small diameter so it wouldn't hold a very high capacity pump. If the conditions are right, I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work though and work well.