#238 - How To Dig A Shallow Well Pt 1 (And Find Lots Of Water!)

the journey to finding good usable water on our property hasn't been an easy one it started two and a half years ago when we hired a well Witcher that was recommended in town do you call it witching or dowsing or engineers they call it they call a fiction yes as the well which worked around our property he wouldn't tell me there was water there but he would always tell me it was deep and this worried me because I knew we're gonna cost some significant money to get down to get some shorter now you get down specially on the shallower you can dig down you can dig down six feet your walker anymore doesn't matter doesn't matter until you get a dry year crazy but right then they're gone I happen to have one of these Seymour augers which allows you to add extensions to it and I actually was able to get down quite deep with it this is the hole that the well Witcher said was six feet beep 14 gallons per minute [Music] after two to three days of fighting this seymour auger I couldn't get any deeper so I went into town and picked up the local excavator Oh as far as six feet and 14 gallons per minute we're not there but I think there's something here I continue to find wet dirt in one particular place in my property even in the driest months of the summer but it just wasn't there well I tried I tried I dug as deep as I felt I could safely dig I'm down 14 feet approximately 40 feet because our property is a hillside ranch one particular spring my nephew and myself hiked all over the hill and we would find these Springs doesn't mean we can't drink it right roost little grd I never heard anybody know I then attempted to use my backhoe to push a Sand Point 20 feet down into the soil and after getting down about eight to ten feet the sand point snapped off so we were just striking out but in the back of my head I knew there was a spot that I could dig this spot right here I'm thinking 12 to 15 feet is all that I'm gonna have to dips dig so what I'm gonna do is dig down about that deep with the backhoe and then if it leech isn't like I think it's going to I'm gonna make about a 12 foot by 12 foot square down on the ground sets two or three concrete culverts down in there and put a manhole cover on it and then set a pump down and I actually found a company online that I'm looking forward to working with it has not only a pump but they have a gauge they have all of the things that basically solar panels that I could put right here I'll probably put two separate solar panels right here for this and everything that I basically would need to get water up to the place so I got another bid on the well this week and it was actually higher than my first bid so Wells just out of the picture and we're now at this point where we're trying to do whatever we have to do to get living up here this fall so here we go this particular spot had all the evidences of being water underground the vegetation growing around it it just looked right sure enough I get down a few feet and there's water already running into the hole okay so I have dug down about 10 12 feet and I could see the water rushing in from all around this hole which in every other hole I've dug I've never ever seen that and in the time that it took me to walk up on the hill get a tape measure and come back there's probably 3 2 or 300 gallons of water in the bottom of the sink so what I've now decided to do because I know that the waters here in the waters flowing is I'm going to go ahead and dig the hole big enough to get the culverts in initially I was just going to dig a trench and and then see how fast the water flows but there's no reason to do any more than than what I've done as far as measuring it so now I'm gonna dig the hole get it as big as I want to get it squared off plenty big enough to get a 4-foot culvert down in here I want to try and get the bottom squared off and flat and I'm still gonna try to dig down as deep as I can the edges are a little bit questionable and I want to move the back around too much so there's one tree right here close by I need to pluck out of the way but I'm just gonna keep digging now that I know what I know about this and my gut feeling is I'd come back in the morning and this thing's gonna be about 90% full which is probably as full as it's gonna get I got the hole dug more than deep enough you can literally hear the water running into the hole my hope is that by letting it sit overnight then a lot of the sediments going to settle I'm going to bring my water my trash pump up here and pump it out two or three times try and get a lot of sediment out there and I'm hoping that tomorrow I can set the concrete culverts that will be necessary to to capture as much of the water as possible but I'm guessing at the rate this is flowing in here it's probably 15 20 gallons per minute flowing in here so this as long as I can figure out my pumps pumping it up above our house this solves our problem this is such a big deal I'm gonna probably focus on this for the next three or four days and get this resolved so I can have water running on the property we're about 18 feet deep maybe not even that deep 16 feet deep as far as my extendo can reach I think what I'll do is once I get the the culverts stacked in place I'll probably takes a lot of these big rocks and stack them around that and then maybe even get a load or two of one to two-inch or bigger rock to put around it but I mean it's literally running running right down in there it's pretty crazy to just hear it running right down in that hole so I had an idea this was a good spot to dig I've been looking at it for two years there's wild mint there's other things growing around it make me made me think this is a good spot and so now the next step is just capturing it and getting it into storage tanks from from the storage tanks I'm gonna let gravity provide our pressure to our house and then I'll put ultraviolet filters ultraviolet lights and carbon filters as well as just general sediment filters at the house to ensure that by the time the water gets to the house that we've got beautifully clean water so this is really exciting this is definitely a burden off my shoulders but at the same time I still got a fair amount of work to do to get this done and to put it into perspective I will have less than probably $1,500 tied up in this versus the $12,000 for the well and I still would have had to buy a storage tank for the well as well so the next morning when I showed up at the property this is how full it had gotten I knew we'd solve our water problem but the next question is how to best capture this water pump it nearly 500 feet up the hill store it properly where it's not gonna freeze then filter it in a way where it's going to be usable around the property we can figure this out I know the right filters and right places will solve any problems with the water this changes everything and I can't wait to get this figured out

Channel: Red Poppy Ranch

Views: 380,863

Rating: 4.8813734 out of 5

Keywords: off grid living, off grid, homesteading, homestead, barnhouse, off grid cabin, barn house, off grid homestead, Farm house, living off the grid, DIY, DIY Home Build, Idaho homestead, idahome, off grid idaho, red poppy ranch, How to dig a well, DIY shallow well, diy well, shallow well, How to find water

Id: uwR0gOlhd54

Length: 9min 15sec (555 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 30 2018