How do dig a well

This first form is of extreme importance. Push loose earth behind the forms. Then push foot lengths of reinforcing rod into the earth so they extend five feet above the top of the well. The number of rods required varies with the type of ground. Seven rods are sufficient for normal conditions, but as many as 19 rods may be needed for shifting ground.

A second set of shutters is now positioned above the first. The space behind is filled with concrete. Be sure to coat the shutters with oil to prevent the concrete from sticking to them. The concrete is mixed at a ratio of A convenient way to measure this is by constructing two bottomless wooden boxes.

One is 12 inches deep for measuring gravel, while the other is six inches deep for measuring sand. When mixed with pounds of cement, the proportions will be correct.

This quantity should be just about right for filling behind one two-foot high shutter. Both should be free from soil or clay. Use clean water only. The concrete should be tamped carefully into the shutter to eliminate air pockets, but be careful not to disturb the reinforcing rods.

Leave the top of the concrete rough, so it makes a good bond with the next layer. When the pouring behind the second shutter is completed, make the first curb. This is a groove in the earth side of the well immediately above the top of the second shutter. The groove should be about eight inches high and cut about a foot into the side of the well.

One pin for each reinforcing rod is driven into the groove, and a hooked end of the pin fastened to the reinforcing rod. Then a horizontal rod is put in place and fastened to each pin and vertical rod. Then hand-fill the curb with concrete all around, put the third set of shutters into place, and pour concrete behind them.

Two more sets of shutters are set in place and cemented. The top is now five feet above ground level. The concrete should be left overnight before proceeding. The weakest part of the well is at ground level. For this reason, the top should be made six inches thick. The shutters below are left in position. Leave them for at least a week to allow the concrete to cure.

But remove the shutter at the surface, being careful not to disturb the plumbing pegs, which hold your plumbing rods. Three more shutters are added and concreted one at a time. Before concreting the top lining, the tops of the reinforcing rods are bent around the well at about two inches above ground level. Concrete is poured to six inches above ground level. This will keep surface water out and protect the well from falling debris.

The first lift is now complete. He would have kept digging until he reached the water table , where all the spaces between the rock and dirt particles are filled with water, and water filled the bottom of the hole.

Some wells are still dug by hand today, but more modern methods are available. In many places wells provide a reliable and ample supply of water for home uses , irrigation , and industries. Where surface water is scarce, such as in deserts,people couldn't survive and thrive without groundwater. Digging a well by hand is becoming outdated today as automated drilling methods replace manual-labor methods.

Modern wells are more often drilled by a truck-mounted drill rig. Still, there are many ways to put in a well — here are some of the common methods. Hacking at the ground with a pick and shovel is one way to dig a well. If the ground is soft and the water table is shallow,then dug wells can work. Historically, dug wells were excavated by hand shovel to below the water table until incoming water exceeded the digger's bailing rate.

The well was lined with stones, brick, tile, or other material to prevent collapse, and was covered with a cap of wood, stone, or concrete. They cannot be dug much deeper than the water table — just as you cannot dig a hole very deep when you are at the beach Dug and bored wells have a large diameter and expose a large area to the aquifer. These wells are able to obtain water from less-permeable materials such as very fine sand, silt, or clay. Some disadvantages of this type of well are that they are shallow and lack continuous casing, making them subject to contamination from nearby surface sources, and they go dry during periods of drought if the water table drops below the well bottom.

Driven wells are still common today. They are built by driving a small-diameter pipe into soft earth, such as sand or gravel. A screen is usually attached to the bottom of the pipe to filter out sand and other particles.

They can only tap shallow water, and because the source of the water is so close to the surface, contamination from surface pollutants can occur. Most modern wells are drilled, which requires a fairly complicated and expensive drill rig. Drill rigs are often mounted on big trucks. They use rotary drill bits that chew away at the rock, percussion bits that smash the rock, or, if the ground is soft, large auger bits. Drilled wells can be drilled more than 1, feet deep.

Often a pump is placed in the well at some depth to push the water up to the surface.. Wells and Pumpage.

Groundwater users would find life easier if the water level in the aquifer that supplied their well always stayed the same.

Seasonal variations in rainfall and the occasional drought affect the "height" of the underground water level. Withdrawing water from a well causes the water levels around the well to lower.

The water level in a well can also be lowered if other wells near it are withdrawing water. When water levels drop below the levels of the pump intakes, then wells will begin to pump air - they will "go dry. Pumping a well lowers the water level around the well to form a cone of depression in the water table.

If the cone of depression extends to other nearby wells, the water level in those wells will be lowered. The cone develops in both shallow water-table and deeper confined-aquifer systems. In the deeper confined-aquifer system, the cone of depression is indicated by a decline in the pressure and the cone spreads over a much larger area than in a water-table system. For a given rate of withdrawal, the cone of depression extends deeper in low-yielding aquifers than in high-yielding ones.

Even though water is present at some depth at almost any location, the success of obtaining an adequate domestic supply usually 5 gallons per minute of water from a well depends upon the permeability of the rock. All of that hard work on your part will be well worth it in the end because there is simply no better way to ensure that you and your family will always have good, clean free water for the long term.

There are quite a few variations in design and operation when it comes to private, residential wells, but they all operate more or less on the same principle, and indeed have many of the same components.

Well Hole — What might be called the well itself, this is the hole that is excavated or otherwise created in the earth that creates a path to the water contained in the soil.

Well Casing — The well casing is a constructed or prefabricated structure that is placed in the well hole and goes all the way from the water source up to the surface. This gives a well structure, and prevents it from collapsing.

Whatever the well casing is made from, its purpose is to keep out dirt and potentially contaminated groundwater from the water source that the well is drawing from. The most common modern materials used for well casings are metal or plastic. Steining — The steining is the wall of the well above the ground, typically built over a base portion called the well curb.

A steining might be constructed in place, or might be designed prefabricated so it can be sunk under its own weight. A steining must be thick enough to hold up the weight of material or well cap above it. Well Curb — A protective rim or other structure around the opening of the well hole in the surface of the ground. This keeps things from falling into the well, including people and animals, and also provides the foundation for mounting a covering or mechanism for the raising and lowering of a water retrieval device.

Well Cap — A well cap is any protective cover placed atop the uppermost opening in the well as intended to prevent dirt, debris and insects from entering the opening. This prevents contamination as well as accidents.

Well Screen — A well screen is a crucial component for any modern well, and attaches near the bottom of the well casing in order to prevent the intake how many larger debris like rocks, gravel, sediment, insects or small animals into the water drawn from the well.

Modern variations are typically made from metal or plastic, and designs can range from intricate to simple. Pump — It is rare to find a modern well without a pump of some kind. The type of pump used will depend on the type of well and its placement, but the two most common are the jet and submersible types. Jet pumps are typically employed for shallow wells and mounted above ground, relying on suction to pull water out of the well.

Submersible pumps can be used for deep wells, and are lowered into the well casing until they contact the water source where they push it up through a supply pipe. Vessel — All kinds of vessels have been used in primitive wells for the retrieval of water, the one that is most commonly imagined being a bucket and rope on a pulley or even employed free hand. Other options include leather waterskins, ladles and similar. Compared to pumps, using any kind of water drawing vessel introduces significantly more chances of contamination, especially from microorganisms.

Nonetheless, they might still be required in austere conditions. Now that you generally know what you are looking at when examining the diagrams or plans for any kind of well, it is time to move on to well design itself, as well as whether or not a well is considered shallow or deep.

Drilling is the installation method of choice when installing a modern, private well. The only downside to drilling is that it requires more specialized equipment than any other method of installation. Today, a drill rig is hauled or moved around by large and powerful trucks, but primitive drills of various types were moved and assembled by teams of men over the centuries.

Even when it comes to drilling, a variety of methods might be used depending on the substrate where the well is located. Conventional rotary bits will defeat rock; large, screw shaped augers will get through softer soils; percussion bits will crush the hardest of materials. Drilling allows installation of the deepest wells, sometimes going more than a thousand feet deep. Driven wells are another choice for modern installations, and are executed by driving into the ground a small-diameter pipe which serves as the well casing.

Due to the trouble associated with driving any length of pipe through increasingly dense soil which reaches maximum compression very quickly driven wells are only used for shallow installations. As we will learn later, shallow installations are significantly more vulnerable to contamination.

Now we are going old school. Dug wells are the oldest kind of well, and still employed today all around the world. Dug wells rely entirely on human labor with common tools in order to excavate the well hole. Once the water table is reached and a satisfactory fill rate is determined, the digging stops and the well casing is installed from the water table up to the well curb.

One obvious drawback to dug wells is that they are typically shallow and more vulnerable to contamination than other kinds of wells and can only go as deep as the water table itself and no deeper; human beings cannot dig a hole any deeper than the point where it fills in with water!

The majority of wells that are built today are drilled. This will involve a drilling rig, similar to the one that is used for digging for oil. The advantage to drilling a well is that it will run very deep into the Earth, as in hundreds of feet deep.

As a result, drilled wells are capable of not only sucking up more water, but more clean water as well. The disadvantage to drilling a well has to do with price. You can plan on spending literally over five thousand dollars in total if you want to drill a well. If five thousand is too much to spend, the alternative is the traditional method of physically digging a well. This is where you dig a hole below water level to allow the water to fill up the hole. People have been digging wells like this for many millennia and still do in certain places in the world.

You can either dig a well either with a shovel, or you can use power tools and drilling equipment. Regardless, dug wells are not going to be as deep as a drilled well and the water will likely not be as clean. But there are techniques that you can use to increase the chances of the water being as pure as possible. By lining the top part of the water well with impermeable substances such as bricks or concrete, you lower the risk of your well being contaminated.

Determining whether a well will be shallow or deep is not just a matter of figuring out how far you have to go to strike water, although that is part of it. Shallow and deep wells differ fundamentally in where they source their water from, as well as what challenges are present in keeping that water drinkable or otherwise usable. Shallow wells are any well that is 50ft.

The mineral content of the water source from a shallow well is typically low, meaning the water will rarely need any softening treatment, but there is a higher incidence of bacterial and viral contamination in water sourced from a shallow well. Shallow wells are significantly more vulnerable to contamination by other groundwater, chemical spills, and other mishaps that can all leach through the soil to the well water itself.

Even worse, and a potentially major setback for people living in more arid climates, shallow wells can lose water or even dry up completely in the hot seasons or whenever the water table drops. Your well that you are completely dependent on for water might betray you if it is a shallow well. Contrast this with deep wells, classed as any well that goes deeper than 50ft. Many sources will require softening to make the water usable.

On the other hand, deep wells do have some significant advantages, namely that the water they source is often safer and purer than a shallow well, discounting the mineral contamination. Additionally, deep wells will very rarely if ever run dry or otherwise I run out of water, especially when compared to shallow wells.

Whether or not you come to depend on a shallow or deep well for your private wealth is a matter of where you live, the local soil conditions, and a dozen other variables. Occasionally you might be able to use one or the other, or even both.