How to drill a shallow well by hand

welcome to Brad's project number 33 or 133 or something I'm fixing to drill my own well by hand and the reason I'm doing this is the town I live in charges more for sewage than they charge for water so if you water your flowers or wash your car or hose your driveway off they charge you a crazy amount of sewage even though you're not using the sewage so I've been researching a lot of methods over the years of getting water shallow well and here's what I've come up with to be the best way for me to access water this is a fencepost auger it's 8 inches it adjusts from 6 to 8 inches it's made by a company called Seymour and I've got 5 4-foot extensions here and the 4-foot that's on there that should get me down 25 feet when I got some callers there too and if I don't reach water in 25 feet I don't know what I'm going to do I'm gonna have to move try another hole somewhere else because the pump the pitcher pump I have will only pull water up from about 22 feet max so I've already started it here I'm down about a foot I just wanted to try it out I did that yesterday but today I got all my extensions and fix him give a shot this may be a long video it's a lot of work and I've got to put a casing in and pea gravel and more pipe and foot valves and I bought a pitcher pump for 20 bucks that needs the leathers replaced and a rebuild kits about 11 bucks from laymen's so I'll have to order that so it's probably going to be a maybe a 2-part for a 3-part anyway that's uh that's today's project see you okay I don't want to jinx myself but uh I'm officially down four feet and uh god it's only taken me ten minutes to go that far I'm going to add an extension and go another four feet that's what I get out of here so far I've got plenty of holes I can use that dirty M god it is he'll be in fact an old alright I put another extension on and see if I can get another another four foot down there okay it's right at eight foot in about 45 minutes it's starting to get really hard now got to put another four foot extension on there keep going I'm a little hesitant to go dump this dirt because if I don't hit water I'm gonna have to have something to fill this hole in otherwise all my dog will go up missing we're a kid okay I'm gonna take a break and put an extension on and get back to digging all right I got a next section on and guess what as I was a I don't know if you can see there I don't know he couldn't see the reflection the last shovelful I took out his water started seeping in so I'm assuming I'm at the top of the water table which is good it was a 8 foot down I think I'm gonna go down another eight foot see what happens and if the water replaces itself quick enough all I just have me a 16 17 foot well oh okay back to work well I've gone down about another foot and a half and but please don't drop your phone my god that would be terrible and it's getting harder and harder to get a full shovel full up this is what I'm pulling out it's a sandy mud muddy sand and as I'm drawing this thing up the largest portion of it has fallen back down the hall hole so uh I don't know what I'm going to do I may have to make some kind of bucket and well I was sitting here catching my breath and my wife yelled out the door that she wanted me to knock off clean up and come take her to eat Mexican food and of course me being the man of the house I said I'm right in the middle of something and I'll take you to eat Mexican food when I'm good and ready so it turns out I'm good and ready so looks like I'll be Mexican food here in a few minutes anyway hasta manana man it's another day where do I start last night we had torrential absolutely torrential rains tornadoes touched down all around us I don't even know how many inches we had well I had gotten this hole down to about eleven and a half foot not quite 12 foot I covered it up with this laid the wheelbarrow over the top of it and then the rains came and let me show you what's happened here and I don't know what to do it has completely filled up and washed a huge cavity about two feet down below the surface of where I am the rainwater has washed a gigantic cavity out from underneath this initial hole here and I got I'm just scratching my head wondering I you know I've bailed I've got this bucket here I bailed and bailed and bailed and I'm not even making a dent in this it's about half mud half water and I've called a rental place let's see how much rent in the trash pump would be that's a hundred and three bucks a day option two is to button this up and come back in August when it's a driest and try to finish this in August so if I go ahead and if you see this then I decided not to continue and just wait till August to dig this out all over again I am at my the limit I set for how much money I wanted to spend on this and I'm a little over 200 bucks right now and I rent a trash pump would put me at another hundred dollars 103 I'm not I'm not sure what I'm going to do I'm going to mess with this a little bit longer I think what I'm going to do is turn the light on this iPhone and hold my iPhone down this hole so I can record or at least get a look and see how big that cavity is down here and may not even I mean you know standing on this may not even be a good idea of that cavity is big enough well I'm going to shut this off and turn the phone the light on the phone and hold the phone down that hole and God help me if I drop this phone down there well I've decided to put this project on hold for a little bit there's not much I can do unless I rent a trash pump or put this off until the dry season you know end of July August I've got a bunch of other things I need to get done around here so I can't afford to waste time on this well when it should be going quicker I've got to get that any Christ up in the driveway and take some parts of it see if I can't figure out why I don't have any turbo pressure and I still got to make a pad for putting my firewood down on behind my workshop sold my big-screen TV I need to get my wood stove in here or the TV was and hooked that up and get the piper in and got a zillion things I got to get done and I'm getting a little bit overwhelmed being a truck driver and having a limited amount of time home it's just you got to get so much done when you are home and then when you're on the road all you can do is think about the things you didn't get done oh well one day at a time I'm going to go ahead and put this up if anybody has any suggestions on this well I sure appreciate whatever input you have already see it well since I can't finish digging my well till I find a way to get all that mud out I've decided to go start putting together the casing and the well pipe that will attach to the pitcher pump and well the first thing I have to do on the casing is to cut a bunch of slots in this casing in the bottom part of the casing four feet to allow the water to come into this casing inside this casing will be the smaller pipe that picks up the water that trickles in through here this is four inch pipe what I'll have is an 8 inch hole which will two inches around it for me to fill in with a pea gravel so here's what I've done I started at about six inches from the end here I capped the bottom started at about six inches and went up four feet and I drew lines all the way around it three and eight inches apart which leaves roughly the same amount of space in between each 3 and 1/8 inch section right here and here's what I've started doing every 1/2 inch I'm cutting slots using my sawzall with a hacksaw blade in it and I'm going to do that in all three sections this section this section all the way down to the six inch mark here all the way around and that will be where the water seeps in at the very bottom of the well casing like I said I'll have gravel I think I'll go up since I started finding water at the 8 foot level I think I'll go up all the way near to the top of this with gravel and then from there on up to the top of the hole I'll fill in with dirt so I still got a good bit of work to do I've actually decided to go rent a thrash pump tonight and I called a rental place and if I rent it you know just before they close then I have to have it back just before they close the next day so that's 24 hours of rental so what I'll do is rent it get it back here tonight get it all set up and ready to pump and first thing in the morning get out here and see if I can't pump all that mud out of there go down another 4-foot sink this casing fill it up with gravel and get as much as I can done before I got to bring that pump back it's about a hour over there to where I want to rent it this is the problem with living in the middle of nowhere you have to go so far to get anything done or rent anything or to buy anything but it's worth it okay that's what I got so far see you okay I got all the slots cut I got my bunk mounted and threaded and I got my collar on there the collar is going to fit down inside this pipe I'm getting there I've got my foot valves and threaded I don't have this connected to the PVC pipe yet because I'm not certain what length I'm going to need so I'm just getting as much done as they possibly can ahead of time and I've reached the end here so I think I'm fixing to go get my thrash pump trash pump brother that's a foot valve if anybody doesn't know what that is this is it's actually goes like this it's at the bottom of the pickup pipe this would be near the near the bottom of the casing near this end here and it's a one way valve basically it allows water to come up this way that doesn't allow the water to go back out of it once you get it in there and the reason you need that is so you don't have to constantly prime this pump here because without water in there there's not enough suction to pull it whatever 24 22 feet up that pipe without being primed so if you use a foot valve once you finally get it primed and up to the pump the foot valve doesn't allow water to drain back out so you can go away and come back a week later and pump that handle and water will come out within a few strokes because the water will you know stay up close to the bottom here okay nothing uh nothing new when I get that trash pump all I'll start them all I just couldn't give up on this I've done so much work to get it down as far as I got it I decided to rent a trash pump and go ahead working but it's real slow going all right I am back down to the original 12 foot that I managed to get down to first this thing it's not easier it's just making it doable it was not doable before because the water in the hole when I would get a bike with a auger get auger for the dirt by the time I got it through the water and up out of the hole there was nothing left in it so I was able to suck all the mud out of the hole with this I had to really I had to get my garden hose and add water and then I took this and just kind of stirred it all up and took about an hour and I finally got down to the bottom of my 12-foot hole and now I'm taking a few bites with this and then sucking the water out with that and then going back with the auger it's time-consuming now if I get to that top of that handle that'll be a full 16 foot and I sure do want to go 20 at least 20 foot or maybe 18 or 19 we'll see I mean there's a lot of water in there so we just had a huge huge rainstorm so that might be you know I I want this to be able to pull water out of it in the middle of the driest part of the summer so I'm going to go down as deep as my 51 year old muscles can pull this thing up out of the ground okay I'm down 16 foot that's as far as I can that's as far as I can go that's pretty darn far when you're standing it up I got my pipe down in there with the slits I cut now I'm going to take the gravel pea gravel and dump it around the casing from the bottom of the well up to about the 8 foot level which is where I before the rain that is originally where I hit the top of the water table so theoretically I've got 8 foot of water down there and when I first started digging this it had been a long long time since we had rain and we've been under drought for quite a long time so I'm pretty confident I'll have water even in the driest part of the summer so all right I won't start dumping this gravel down there and I've got some place in and I've got this watery muddy mixture of clay and mud and sand that I've been pulling out so I think I can fill this cavity that washed out I think I can use this to fill that cavity in so I'm going to take a little break drink some water and start pouring that gravel down there okay I got my casing in they got the gravel in I got the cavity about halfway filled in and way under where I ran my when I pump this out a whole bunch of mud came out and at the end of the 50 foot hose is a bunch of more dirt I think I might be able to scrape that up and fill this in they got my pump ready and I'll take another break and then slide that pump down in there and my next video will be of me pulling out muddy looking water what do they say when they strike oil there it is get you good better oh yeah chocolate water my plants don't care what color it is yeah I've got like a whole lot of pumping to make it clear but uh well if you could just go ahead and pump up some of that Texas tea yippee okay like they get the hit okay back at the pump I've made a form to pour an apron I have bent some rebar I've got it temporarily attached just to hold it in place using these blocks and a big hose clamp I made these uh tees here the the concrete I'm going to pour a column up to about this height right here which will leave these uh tees in the concrete and I'll be able to tighten the pump down into the concrete after a oh I probably give it a week are really getting hard drying and so I'm going to do this next the pad the apron and I'm thinking late this afternoon it'll be dry enough where I can set my other form on it which will is going to be a square form a bit of a taper a foot square at the bottom and about ten inches square at the top now pour it right up to about a half inch below this cap here that way I can undo these nuts and pull this pump off and this pipe just sets down inside this cap here so if I have to work on it I can pull it all out and put a new foot valve on it and everything if I have to okay I'm going to get to work mixing this oh by the way eighty pound bags of a cement they're lying they're more like a hundred and eighty pounds okay there's the first pouring I want to let that dry for about 20-30 minutes and come back see if it's set up enough for me to put a nice around it edge on the on the top corners and then I'm going to go build my form for the column I'm going to pour around the casing pipe there and when I get that built and installed I'll do another quick clip here's my form for the column I'm going to pour around the the casing up to the base of the pump it's not pretty but it's functional and I'm hoping this apron that I've poured will dry and a few hours enough for me to pour this because I'd like to get this done today because I believe we're going to have rain this weekend so if I can if I can get to it all film it and put this video up okay I got my form out here I removed them blocks of wood that I had in there holding the rebar up and now I'm fixing to fill this up with concrete using my high-tech concrete installation tool here this is a paint can did you know they're making paint cans out of plastic now anyway I cut it with a knife and I'll be dumping the concrete in with that now if this were the government you could call this concrete installation tool and sell it for 300 bucks alright I'm going to mix up my first bag concrete and start dumping it in there I'm I'm guessing three bags two bags exactly and I brought it up a little higher than I first anticipated on and the reason is this shrunk about a quarter of an inch so if this does the same that'll put it at just about exactly where I wanted to stop with a level of the concrete here okay tomorrow I'll pull this form off and that'll be the end of this video this this little job here will be complete alright there's the finished product not not kind of nice I'm proud of that

Channel: BCtruck, BC Blades

Views: 1,759,360

Rating: 4.564486 out of 5

Keywords: how to, shallow well, drill, water well, auger, fence post auger, hand dug, suface, casing, hand pump, covert, no permit, secret, bugout, cabin, shtf, access, water, teotwaki, off grid, cistern, safe, hand dug well, auger well, post hole well, hand auger, drinking, permitless, irrigation, method, aquire, water table, driller, how to drill a well by hand, dig a well by hand, hand drilled well, shallow well auger, well drilling auger, secret well, pitcher pump, hand pumped well, backyard well

Id: oheEPHf0BjU

Length: 25min 32sec (1532 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 25 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Here's another method. Maybe a bit easier.

[u/[deleted]]

You need to check state an local regulations before doing this. In TN, you must be licensed to drill.

[u/brygates]

OP here. That looked like more work than I would be up for, but I admire his ingenuity.

I think it is not unusual for wells in many places to require a permit before drilling a well. My city does, the permit alone is $298. Multiple inspections are required, even if the well is not for drinking water.

[u/crackerjack4294]

Good to know for some people, I just wish this was possible through my impermeable sandstone. Plus, I think I just watched like 3 hours of this man make random awesome stuff.

[u/t3hcoolness]

1) Dig.

2) Achieve stagnant water.