Using Well water to flush loos and irrigate the garden

Do you have a filter in line to prevent small bits of stuff causing problems with valves (esp. the toilet ball c*ck valves)?

You can buy submersible pump for you well with a float switch. (Shuts it off when dry). The usual way is to pump to a high tank that can be filled from the mains as well.

Water runs from the tank by gravity.

Is there any water in your well? We are in a drought, and also the reason for moving away from the well has to be its unreliability or contamination. Brian

Harry, the OP can and should use the usual ballcock in the tank, particularly if he is thinking of filling from the mains as an alternative.

However, he probably wants to shut the pump off before the ballcock shuts. Otherwise, he'll be wasting electricity and wearing the pump out unnecessarily.

Do you know the porosity of the surrounding rock?

When extracting groundwater, if the rock is very porous it's essentially like the level in a bucket - all the water in the acquifer is at the same level. That means you can extract and the whole acquifer goes down only slightly.

If the rock is only slightly porous, water will find its own level but with a time constant. That's like a hole dug in the sand on the beach - it's below sea level so it'll fill up with water, but it only happens slowly.

If you extract too much water from the acquifer than its natural fill rate, you can end up with a localised drought around your well. This might happen because you extract much faster by pump than previously was taken by bucket.

So could be worth doing some experiments: measure the level in the well, pump out XXX litres, measure the level again and see how it changes over time. (ideally with no rainfall in between)

Theo

Yes, there will need to be a couple of filters.

The Well has water, and there's a small stream not far away, so I don't think supply will be a problem (this is in the Welsh borders). The house was switched to mains water at least 20 years ago so I don't know the reason.

Thanks, that's a good suggestion.

likely contamination or equipment unreliability.

NT

On Tue, 9 May 2017 18:04:48 -0700 (PDT), snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote:

Contamination may have been there years in some cases and only picked up on by a test in more recent times.

When my Mother and Father got into their 70's although they owned the farm they lived on they took advantage of a scheme where they got a grant to improve some things in the house, double glazing, rewire , stair lift for dad and a few other items. As part of that their water from the private well was analysed and declared unfit. The nearest main supply is still over a mile and a half away and it isn't practical to get connected to it so a system of filters and UV light was installed to treat the well water. Filters need regular changing every six months or so and although not a huge amount it uses more electric with regular automatic back flushing and the UV light than just plain pumping up from the well via a Lister domestic pump ever did and with the service visits costs£100+ a year to run. Dad made it to 90+ as did his Father ,Mother is nearing that , my siblings and myself don't appear to have been poisoned from what we drank when growing up. Mother has now moved into a village and to her the mains water tastes disgusting. To get closer to what the op asked we also had an older well that was kept just irrigate the garden and vegetable patch, it is a useful asset to have . Back in 76 when there were hosepipe restrictions everywhere the water board for the area were fairly diligent in watching for people defying them, one board van drove past and saw Mother watering the runner beans stopped and reversed back and from the van emerged a red faced employee who started to rudely lay down the law to her. My normally mild mannered Mother tore him off a strip with a withering verbal attack along the lines of "Your flaming mains stop nearly 2 miles away ,check your flaming maps before you come here telling me to not use our water from our well and your are a flaming rude little jobsworth who needs to learn some manners. He meekly apologized and went on his way. FTAOD they did have the relevant abstraction licence.

You do need a gauze filter as a minimum, we found a froglet on the loo seat once . Concensus was it got drawn through the system as a small tadpole and had been devoping in the cistern but we were never really sure how it got there. Inspection showed the filter had fallen off though.

G.Harman

So the OP could possibly use a redundant DHW tank or something like that if he had one spare?

Adding on to that - you made me think:-) - could not you fit a pressure switch of some sort in the pipe to the ball c*ck to control the pump?

Ball c*ck open = low pressure, ballcock closed = high pressure!

I have never fitted one but I'll make the suggestion.