WELL DRILLING 101 | Every Step Explained

I know it's really cool it's 325 oh hello sorry I was just telling a friend here blah blah blah this is so dumb okay so let me just start by explaining what's in the ground that we're gonna be dealing with while drilling the well so we have bedrock that's deep down that's where we ultimately want to get to but on top of that is a certain amount of what you call overburden overburden is clay and sand and and gravel and boulders and water that's sitting on top of the bedrock now in some areas you'll see bedrock outcropping right on the surface and there is no overburden at all where you see that in other areas there'll be hundreds of feet of overburden it really depends on geological processes that I really couldn't tell you much about so you got to get through that overburden and down to bedrock and that can be a variety of different types of rock in my case that happened to be shale so in order to get down to that water you got to drill through the overburden into the bedrock and hit water and you know in my mind this whole thing before we even started I found this to be completely amazing because deep down inside under the ground like that that is like unknown territory it's like it's like a frontier it's like alien almost it's like going down to the bottom of the ocean I mean we don't you can't just go down to the ground I mean there's all kinds of organisms and all kinds of things that like you know are totally foreign to us down there I imagine so I got really excited about the whole thing and when talking to different well drillers they started telling me all different stories like one of the coolest ones is when sometimes when they're drilling they'll actually all of a sudden the drill just goes just drops and a reason for that is because you can hit a cave they have hit caves that like are not accessible from the outside world they're completely uncharted there no one has ever been in them before and now we just broke a hole into him and you know it just boggles the mind like you know what does that look like so there are two main types well really there's one main type of drilling that's done around release around here these days and that is a rotary drilling machine this is a giant machine on a truck it's diesel-powered and it has a hydraulic giant hydraulic pump on it and what it's doing is its it's a basically like a giant hammer drill if you're familiar with like a Dewalt hammer drill you might buy at Home Depot it's spinning but as you apply pressure to the drill bit pushing up it starts hammering like hammering down with the idea is its fracturing the masonry that you're drilling into or the rock that you're drilling into and that is the exact same thing that's going on with the with the rotary drilling machine so another method that's still used around here although a lot less used is the cable tool and that is basically instead of a rotary motion it's literally just a big drill bit that is just lifting up and then slamming down and a pound per pound pounding into the earth and fracturing up that rock we definitely gave each a lot of consideration and I'm gonna cover that in another video but we ended up choosing the common method nowadays it is the rotary drilling machine so this machine arrives on a truck it's got a support truck that's filled with a couple thousand gallons of water and this machine has a giant boom on it that lifts up in the air it's got a drilling head up on that boom that travels up and down about 20 feet and that is the head that is spinning and that is hammering and then that's all hydraulic powered to get started they get the machine all levelled out so it's got these feet that come down and level out the machine because the machine is not level you're not gonna drill a straight hole down into the ground it's gonna be angled in whatever angle the machine is at so once it gets leveled out they start the process by attaching the drill bit which is like this giant like Tri wheeled grinding tool so these little grinding heads I believe they spin and the the drill head that the drill bit actually has holes in the init that shoot out water and compressed air and I'm gonna get to that in a little bit so machine starts drilling it sends down a 20-foot lengths of pipe once it gets there a little collar is secured around the end of that 20 foot shaft to hold it from falling into the hole and then the the drilling head the power head rises up 20 feet and then there is a spindle that swings over and drops off another 20 foot shaft and is attached to the power head that comes down to the previous twenty foot shaft and then it spins and threads it into the previous one and then it goes down another 20 feet locks in the pipe around the collar and then power head rises back up 20 feet and again and again and again until you hit bedrock once you hit bedrock that's when the casing comes in so the casing is a six inch steel pipe that keeps all the overburden from falling in the hole it's necessary because the overburden is it's sand and dirt and mud and all these and gravel and that can just fall collapse and fall to fill up this hole so we need something to keep all that stuff out so we grab a piece of a 20 foot length of steel pipe and basically it's a very similar process to the drilling the same mechanism grabs it spins it pushes it into the ground so each 20 foot length of casing has threaded ends so one side is male the other side is female so when they're connecting each of those lengths it they spin the top one onto the one that's the previous one that's already in the ground and they thread it in makes a tight connection then he comes back and arc welds it completely together because think about it you might have to go down you know maybe you're lucky you only have to go down forty to eighty feet into overburden or maybe you're not lucky and you have to go down you know 100 200 maybe even 300 feet of overburden before you get to the bedrock the spinning action that's pushing that that casing down there's a lot of friction against the side is that of the hole the drilled hole against the overburden and you don't want to compromise those connections so by welding it by threading it and welding it you're making a super-strong shaft that just is not gonna compromise as you're pushing that casing down the very first section of pipe that goes in they attach a drive shoot to it so I guess that's like a I know if it's hardened but it's definitely like a thick piece of steel that just threads onto the bottom of that pipe and the point of it is is that once you get down to bedrock with the casing all the way down basically what they turn on the the hammer drill portion of the power head and it actually just literally drills pounds and drills that that drives you and thus the whole casing into the bedrock about eight to ten feet that drives you if you did that with just casing it would probably break up the steel but the drive shoe is super strong so it's able to keep everything intact while that's happening so now we're 8/10 feet into the bedrock so we're locked in all that overburden can't get into the casing now because we come out of the surface so nothing's gonna fall on the top and we're in the bedrock on the bottom so we're sealed we're sealed as far as the overburden goes next thing you got to do is is actually seal the outside around the outside of the casing into the bedrock the hole that's being drilled for the casing is 2 inches bigger diameter than the casing itself so that is what's creating is approximately like you know half an inch to an inch on each side gap that we need to fill up because what we don't want is surface water ultimately making its way down through or really contaminated surface water which is possible because we are humans and we make a mess of things may it working its way down around the outsides of the casing and thus into the bedrock contaminating the water supply so they've put in something called grout that is in my case they use a bentonite clay the powder like cement is and they literally just dumped it in and then you know water will mix with it and there's moisture down there and it will harden and totally seal up that the outside of that casing I've seen some other cases where like they're purposely putting in more material to come up all the way to the surface my well driller said that a lot of the debris that comes out of the top of the casing as we're drilling into bedrock will fall in and fill the rest of the gap between the casing and the overburden in my case it turned out I had about a hundred and eighty feet of overburden before we hit bedrock the first 15 feet was some big boulders and it was gravel and a little bit of clay silty stuff but then it just turned into like solid clay the nice thing about that is that clay is not very permeable it basically since it's just like muck it like boozed right in and suctioned itself to the sides of the casing which is good because that's gonna help keep any kind of surface contamination from working its way down to ground water or even alongside the casing so in addition to the grout that the fact that I had like a hundred and whatever was sixty five feet of just mucky clay is gonna seriously help keep any surface water contamination from ever getting down there [Music] [Music] so with with a rotary drill you know you've hit water when literally water just erupts out of the hole it was pretty violent actually you got all that compressed air blowing all the debris and all the water used for drilling and cooling the bit and all that up out of that hole and you see that coming up it's you know it's not too much it's pretty consistent just a spray that's coming up but when we hit water man holy cow it just blew right out of there gushing it almost if you're standing in the right place you would have got knocked over that is when we knew it was time to stop and assess the situation and I ended up with about 10 gallons a minute of flow in the end all right so after you got your hole drilled your casing in and your your drilled all the way down to the bedrock and developed a good amount of water flowing into you into your well it's time to drop the pump in so I think they took in shot diameter PVC and threaded it into the top of a 220 volt and Peller pump and meant for Wells and out right down on the bottom of that PVC right above the pump they got this blue thing look like rubber and I didn't ask but I believe it was to push against the sides of the casing or the bedrock wherever they dropped it and it's to keep the the pump centered in the pipe could be wrong on that so if I'm wrong please correct I imagine when the pump goes on it's pretty powerful pump so it's probably gonna want to move around a little bit at least on startup so that's just gonna keep it in the middle instead of banging against the side of the hole so yep up with that they ran to 110 volt hots for the 220 and the neutral and they basically similar to how they were doing the casing and the drilling stick by stick twenty foot lengths they dropped the pump down and then connected the sticks of PVC to each other just by threading them a male and female thread so it's standard I guess PVC water pipe I don't know if this is drainage pipe or what PVC is usually drainage pipe from my experience this isn't under pressure it's just a pump pumping up to a tank or another pump I'm not sure the details on that pipe yeah so in this case you can do this by hand but they had a truck with a little crane on it with a little attachment that has a collar on it that allowed them to hold the pipes vertically and there it's how they're able to thread them on top of each other and then lower them down together they went down 180 feet and that was not an arbitrary number [Music] [Applause] [Music] look at the screen that tells you how far down the order is temperature seventy two point four feet we're going down oh I see okay so it's got like some type of sonar okay cool so let's take a step back so the whole depth of the well was 325 feet we hit water at 300 they went down another 25 feet not exactly sure why I imagine it's probably because any sediment coming in from the water veins it has a chance to to settle down low but below where we hit water so it never clogs up down there but again if I'm wrong on that please correct me so then when we drilled it the pressure of those veins push water in and rose that water level in the well up to 52 feet below the surface and that's where it leveled off then at that point you had enough weight of that water holding back that pressure so when we take water out and bring the water level down lower than 52 feet it'll work its way right back up at about 10 gallons a minute because that's the rate of flow coming into the well so we dropped the pump down to a hundred eighty feet so that's approximately 126 feet below the level of the water in the well in the casing there so if you think about that you got a little bit over one gallon of water per foot of 6-inch pipe or 6-inch hole there got about a hundred twenty-six gallons maybe about a hundred thirty gallons sitting on top of that pump now that's all the water that's ready to be pumped out so yes we have 10 gallons a minute but we have we can pump out as fast as we want as fast as that pump will let us for that first hundred thirty gallons so very rarely we ever gonna be pumping out one hundred thirty gallons at a time you know generally you're pumping into your home filling up a pressure tank and your pressure tank is never really more than like you know 20 30 40 gallons so you know it's gonna kick on normal in a normal house situation would kick on fill up that tank and then kick off again so it can really just pump as fast as it once in my case I'm probably not going to be using this well water as a primary source it's probably gonna be backup probably filling up a cistern when we don't get enough rain I'll probably just limit the rate of the water flow and I can I got a vow I got a adjustable valve here so I can just keep running it until my sister and is full without running out of that hundred thirty gallons but keep in mind also is that as you're pumping that stuff out new water is coming in so you probably actually have way more than 130 gallons before you actually run dry get the water level down that far so the rate of water coming into my well is around ten gallons per minute the rate that my pump can pump water out of the well is also about ten gallons a minute so if you think about that as I start depleting from that hundred twenty hundred thirty gallon reservoir sitting on top of the pump the water from from underground is refilling the well at about the same rate that the pump is pumping it out so I can never run out of water unless water stops coming up from the ground I can pump out as fast as I want and it'll just keep refilling as I'm pumping it out so I could just pump out ten gallons a minute continuously if I really want it to okay so once we lowered the pump down to one hundred eighty feet the top is capped off with a cap but also a valve that allows me to let the water come out or not and I have an electrical wire coming out the top that goes over to a circuit breaker so I could turn the pump on and off and that's it for now I'm using that to just fill water tanks for construction and our camper when we actually hook this up to the house I'm gonna dig long down alongside the casing about six feet and drill a hole on the side and put what they call a pitless adapter in the side of the of the casing and the water is gonna come out of that adapter and then out pipe underground below frost line to the house the well is just gonna have a solid cap and there's gonna be no access to water out the top anymore you're gonna just access the water from the house at that point well that about wraps up how we did our well here if you have any information that I missed or was incorrect about or just have your own stories about your wells I'd love to hear them please comment below and [Music] I'll see you all next time take care [Music] you

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Views: 1,901,678

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Keywords: sustainable building sustainable architecture off grid build self-sufficiency, construction off grid homesteading, homestead grid-tie, biotecture, resilience, green, permaculture natural building DIY do it yourself carpentry, forestry, tiny house

Id: 0-KLWEnwiaY

Length: 17min 7sec (1027 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 14 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/RighteousSin]

That was cool even without finding any treasure.

[u/prospero_duke]

Very interesting, actually. I've lived in an apartment complex in NW Michigan for many years (four buildings, six units each). (My first and only break with fluoridated city water, so far!) Supposedly fed by an underground river running south from Lake Superior (i.e., quite 'pristine'). It has a small groundwater pump house which has always provided a great supply of potable water (regularly landlord-tested and certified). Yup, each building has a septic tank (also a well-maintained system). Informative to get the details of a 'groundwater system' and its creation!