New Well

[skent]

I did a site survey and have a very accurate and detailed map of the property. Stuff was hooked up and disconnected (property has been in the family since pre-civil war days) and there are pipes, wells, cisterns and old foundations here and there. Up until I started caretaking the property, everything was word of mouth. I started documenting everything. There was a drainfield on the other side of the pole barn that was never recorded and now not used. Stuff like that can cause problems. I was sure the closest possible source was the present drainfield at 139' (MD requires 100' from any source of contam. and 30' from any building or property line.

 

[skent]

Yesterday morning they checked what they had drilled on friday. The 130' shaft had filled in 10' on the bottom and in order to make it usable, a silt screen had to be installed and backfilled (between the stone and silt screen) with filter gravel. They drilled deeper to get a bigger reserve. The well is now 205' deep with 58' of solid casing and the rest (to the bottom) is the silt screen. Well has 175' of water standing in it and last night's pump test yeilded somewhere between 10 and 12 gallons per minute.

The first (dry) hole is 405' and driller is only (?) charging me $4 foot (vs $8) plus $100 to seal it. ($1720)

The second well was 205' ($1640) with 58' casing ($290) plus internal silt screen and filter gravel ($2366) plus grouting ($175) plus pump test ($200) plus well cap ($35) for a total of $4706.

Entire project is now to $6426. I guess it will be a while until I can afford some tractor accessories.

Next stop - plumber-ville. He will be out Wednesday to see what we need.

Monday I'm going to try and convince the county to allow me to keep the old well open - or al the very least give me more time to fill it in.

I can see lots of seat time on the Kubota cleaning up all the stone dust from operation.

 

[skent]

This is what I hope is the end to the story.

Plumber was out yesterday. 150' of ditch & pipe, .5 HP pump and tank, Electric line and pitless adapter, and labor to hook up to house and yard hydrints: $1800.00.

Total price for this whole nine yards is going to be $8400.00.

I'll still have cleanup of the diggings and spoils from the dry well, plus the cost to fill in the old hand-dug well. Good part of this is the tractor time involved!

I'm guessing this was not a worst case scenearo since we finally did get water. . . . .

 

[MarkV]

Steve,

Glad to hear you have the water up and running, or is that flowing./w3tcompact/icons/smile.gif Hopefully a good deep well will last the rest of your life so maybe the price wasn’t that bad. I know those kind of bills are a big hit when there are so many tractor attachments to buy. Our final bill was right at $7500 so I can feel your pain. The one that got me was the septic. We spent $10,000 but it was steeeeeeeep and rocky. The septic guy is driving a new truck though.

MarkV