Well Improvement?

Hello, I have a residence with a deep water well. This well is exactly

200' deep and water is at around the 175' level. The pump is located about 4' off of the bottom with approximately 20' of water above it. The well is 12" inside diameter steel cased. I checked with the county and they do not have any record of the well so it is probably 40 years old or more. This well produces anywhere from 1 gpm to 7 gpm and the rate does not seem to matter if we are having a wet or dry season. I am curious if there is any consensus from people on this newsgroup if I should try to improve this well or have another one put in. Currently, the production is adequate, but just barely. The well is located in the hills in central California. Thanks for suggestions.
Reply to
dieselburner
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theres not much you can do to improve a current well beyond replacing the pump.

its better to drill a new well than screw around with the old one/

with a 200 foot deep well and water at 175 feet i would do that soon, since its only producing 7 GPM most new well minimum is 40 to 50 GPM

400 or 500 feet should do it, keep your old well intact for washing cars and watering plants etc.

you can use it for that and know with your new well much deeper those activites wouldnt ever run you out of water

Reply to
hallerb

Call a local well driller. Where I live, they do "hydrofracking" which is basically a blast of high pressure water that will fracture the surrounding material and allow water to flow into your well faster. But whether this is available or is something that would even work in your area is something I have no idea about.

Reply to
marson

hydro-fracking is a process that may help the existing well :

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Reply to
RBM

with only 25 feet of water, i think it would be a waste of money. besides a deeper well helps guarantee dependable water during a drought.

has the wells production always been so low?

Reply to
hallerb

I have been owned this home for 4 years and it has always produced between 1 and 7 gpm. The depth to water has remained pretty constant. It varies 3 or 4 feet throughout the year.

Reply to
dieselburner

with only 25 feet of water, i think it would be a waste of money. besides a deeper well helps guarantee dependable water during a drought.

has the wells production always been so low?

Drilling it deeper doesn't necessarily produce more water either, just more head. The houses around me, all have 600- 1000 foot wells, and some multiple wells, none of which produce sufficient water, while my well hit the sweet spot @ 160 feet deep it's so good I fill my 32,000 gal swimming pool with it and never had a problem in over 10 years

Reply to
RBM

What I'd advise is to put a couple of large holding tanks on it & let it replenish them at it's own rate. I'd also advise a booster pump between the holding / pressure tanks and the house. My personal setup: 2- 80 gallon pressure tanks, and an 18gmp booster pump. That keeps pressure at around

80psi, and volume is never a problem. I wasn't ever cavitating my well pump to begin with, but this is just nice. Great shower pressure, no problem washing cars or hosing down concrete.

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Reply to
Eric in North TX

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If there is 25ft of water head above the pump, that's quite a lot, actually -- many residential wells would feel quite fortunate to have half that--particularly if it doesn't drop during dry weather means it isn't a surface-supplied aquifer.

There's no way anybody on this group can have any clue whatsoever about the hydrology of the well in question. Going deeper doesn't guarantee a thing--there could be nothing but granite below; there could be a layer of salt water or oil/gas to contaminate what he currently has.

Fracturing is a possibility that actually from the well description has a reasonable chance--there's demonstrated water head, just apparently not enough refresh into the hole. Altho even that isn't really assured--it may be there's simply a small pump or discharge line on the existing pump that is limiting output or the pump impellers are worn.

The only reasonable advice is to ask for local help altho OP has learned of a technique that he can ask about.

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Reply to
dpb

a friend had his well fractured, it was like 50 years old..........

it collapsed soon after he paid to have it done and needed a new well anyway, which was the drillers advice to start with..

Reply to
hallerb

Hello, Should have mentioned that I had all of the plumbing, electrical and the pump in the well replaced when I moved in 4 years ago. The pump moves 10gpm to a 2500 gallon tank and a jet pump supplies water to the house and sprinklers.I have a current sensing pump protector on the pump to protect it when it pumps the well dry.

Reply to
dieselburner

a friend had his well fractured, it was like 50 years old..........

it collapsed soon after he paid to have it done and needed a new well anyway, which was the drillers advice to start with..

Yep, and in your narrow minded way of thinking, because your friend's well collapsed, all wells collapse. There are several methods to fracture a well, and hydro-fracking is the most controlled method, designed to prevent collapse, but as in life, shit happens

Reply to
RBM

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Don't follow the 1-7 gpm flow rate your initial post complained of then in this situation.

20' of standing water in 12" casing is roughly 100 gal if start from fully recharged condition. At 10 gpm, that's a 10-minute run time.

A test of how long it takes to pump the well down from that initial condition would give a reasonable estimate of recharge rate.

W/ as much storage as you have, simply adding a timed circuit to only allow the pump a maximum duty cycle should seem to solve the problem unless the rate of recharge is significantly different w/ season, etc.

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Reply to
dpb

snipped-for-privacy@aol.com wrote: ...

Well, the suggestion to OP was to get local advice. If one gets advice from a qualified person and chooses to ignore it, ...

BTW, is there _any_ phenomenon or disaster you don't have a friend who has had it occur to? :)

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Reply to
dpb

O.K. enough already. You are putting out misleading if not outright false information.

  1. Your "friend" tried the cheapest method first. It didn't work. That's life. Very few wells 'collapse'.
  2. New wells produce 40-50 gmp!!! Good luck finding many at that rate. How much a well will produce _if water is found_ is fairly predictable but it depends on the area where the well is. Many areas expect no more than around 4-gpm and have to live with it.
  3. Drill deeper so you have storage? Did you ever calculate what a
100 ft 6" hole dilled through granite will: a. cost? b. How little water it actually holds?
  1. Forget about the current well!! He already has a 6" hole drilled way down there, tehy can go right back into that hole and drill deeper if _LOCAL_ drilleers think it will do any good. True that the hole will have to be less than 6" but that is no problem.

Harry K

Reply to
Harry K

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote: ...

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How much water do you need? There are a lot of things about your local geology / hydrology that we don't know. In some areas the water table may vary almost not all all from year to year or seasonally. In others it may vary a lot. Of course, when the water table goes below the level of the pump your yield goes to zero.

You don't say whether you use a storage tank, or whether your definition of adequacy is based on the instantaneous yield vs. consumption or averaged over a day or so. If you are not using a storage tank and the well is just barely adequate, then the well will probably be adequate with a tank, as long as the water table does not drop.

Reply to
M Q

I work with one those Halerb types. No matter what comes up in conversation, he's had one bigger, faster, worse, neighbor story, or whatever; or, at least, oh, be careful, it might . . . . .. Never just - oh, I hadn't ever heard of that.

Reply to
DanG

Thinking about this some more leaves me yet more puzzled than before -- is this a recharge rate of some sort, and if it doesn't change by season, then with what _does_ it change and how do you know? While not a huge difference in absolute magnitude, it's a factor of nearly 10 in relative which seems something sizable must be influencing it...

W/O far more info and most of which would be useless to anyone here as no amount of usenet posting can possibly make up for not being on site and familiar w/ the local hydrology, I'll simply note that if this is, indeed a makeup or recharge rate, then in the long run your maximum theoretical output per day is somewhere between roughly 1500-10,000 gal.

Assuming a middle figure of 5 for simplicity, if you're pumping at 10 but recharging at 5, then it would be a net of 5 gpm and the previous 10 min would be closer to 20 and you would net 200 gal/cycle max, and need

20 min to recharge the 100 gal reservoir. That of course, is way overly simplistic as undoubtedly the recharge rate probably decreases as one continues to pump, but that would give you a rough idea of how to come up w/ an acceptable duty cycle as a starting point. Undoubtedly it would require trial and error to ascertain the actual supportable.

As another poster noted, you need to see what your needed output is--unless you're running livestock or small nursery or similar, sounds like you should have more than enough water for a single residence. If not, conservation may be in order... :)

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Reply to
dpb

my father in law has err had a 20 year old well that was failing.........

local driller said go with new well, at 3 times the depth of the old one......

which he did and has 40 GPM for nearly a unlimited time.........

i report what i know you can take it or leave it.

at least the OP knows that fracturing might collapse his well....... and then he has no water at all.......

which is why most drillers prefer drilling a new well.......

standards change, the well casing on a old well mght be leaking, and cause health issues later. old wells were sometimes put close to the septic field, a obvious hazard.

Reply to
hallerb

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote: ...

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Here's a pretty good overall discussion of issues to consider...

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Reply to
dpb

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