Digging a well

[Dlglgraham]

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but have many of you thought or acted on digging a well on your property for emergency use. I have been trying to do as much research as possible on it and it seems easiest to use a well point, they are about 3ft tall with a mesh shaft and point at the bottom, you knock them down then just keep adding shafts until hitting the water table (about 10ft down here). Looks easy in theory?? Would save £'a on storing water!??!

[lee3]

Have you got w link to this item? ..... When you say just knock them down .... Do you mean mechanicly?

[Dlglgraham]

Hi
No sorry no web link. Well points can be brought on eBay, you dig a three foot deep hole with post hole diggers, then use a man operated post rammer, I call them man killer. Knock it down until about 8 inches is left out the ground, then attach another shaft and repeat, it did say well points are ideal down to about 25ft. Where I live that would be perfect! Then either drop a small hose down and hand pump out or possibly a artisan spring if your lucky enough!

[xadmx]

i had a go at digging a well and used the method off this site http://www.drillyourownwell.com/ and it worked really well

[lee3]

Let us know how you get on

[poppypiesdad]

We thought about this , and got a company in to survey our land , we would need to drill about 450 m to get down to ground water , at £100 a meter with a chance that the price may go up , so in total £45,000 so we passed on that one , mainly due to the granite bed rock that we are on ,

J

[adrian007]

there's a borehole map...hang on, I'll find a link...

here: http://mapapps.bgs.ac.uk/boreholescans/ ... scans.html

double click on the area you want and it'll zoom in, you will be able to see data on local boreholes to get an idea of how much it would cost to get one put in...I'm on granite, ain't no way I'll be doing it myself.

Luckily I only have 25m or so to worry about, and the borehole companies prefer rock to less stable things to drill through so that is very high up our list of things to have.

[TwoDo]

We thought about this , and got a company in to survey our land , we would need to drill about 450 m to get down to ground water , at £100 a meter with a chance that the price may go up , so in total £45,000 so we passed on that one , mainly due to the granite bed rock that we are on ,
J

That seems expensive. You may want to get someone else to quote - it kind of sounds like the guy doing it didn't really want the work and priced real high rather than decline to bid. Our borehole was 300 feet (approx 100 meters) and came in at around £5K total including liner and pump. Most of that was the up front fixed cost. It cost extra per foot below a certain distance but it was not anything like £100 a meter. Admittedly, we are on slate and shale. I was talking to the guy doing the drilling and I mentioned granite, thinking it was probably the worst stuff to work in, but he said that actually sand was the worst. Apparently with sand the hole tends to collapse back in before they can get the liner down so they have to do it in something like six foot chunks. In other words, drill six feet, pull the entire drill string up, run the liner down six feet, insert the drill string again, drill another six feet and so on. That gets expensive in a hurry. The drill guy was quite nonchalant about granite but hated sand.