> Some people ... got their rig stuck three different times in their first well! As they wrote, “We recognize that many of our problems are due to our inexperience …. But our inexperience is not much different from yours.”
They have many other articles on the subject; but I'm fond of linking to this one in particular.
I helped dig that well. And several others. The fellow in the middle of the picture there is my dad.
Using the gantry rig pictured in the article was much easier than just the engine unit (much like a post hole digger they sell in stores now). One of our crew was a gifted machinist who ran that up after we bent the several pipes trying to dig without bracing.
> Orville and Dot Synoground of Pine Mountain, Georgia, drilled through 35 feet of solid granite with a Hydra-Drill and a diamond coring bit. They hit the rock layer at 18 feet and kept drilling — cutting about six inches of granite an hour — until they broke through. After three solid weeks of work, Orville and Dot struck water at 165 feet.
I honestly don’t think I’d have that level of determination unless I was truly desperate.
we were "back to the land" hippies (and had the monthly newspaper targeted toward people like us)... "self reliance" was a goal for many, as well as "can't afford to pay professionals to do it."
Thanks for posting this; I have Georgia granite under my feet in random and unpredictable quantities. I've noticed most of the "success stories" in the submitted article happen to be in sandy areas, or with softer ground.
Over here it's sand, sandstone & clay, but I can't even dig a big enough hole to plant a bush without hitting rocks the size of my head. To anyone wishing to drill into the ground like this, good luck!
In Poland it's quite common for people to just hand dig their wells, using concrete rings for the reinforcement of walls. It's legal up to 30 meters depth and up to 5 m^3/day water yield.
Edit: Or maybe I should say "it was" - most new wells are just a vertical steel pipe with a submerged electric pump rather than big concrete rings. These are obviously much more convenient and safer.
With the recent legislation that every Polish village has to be connected to water and sewage even if the homeowner wanted to remain off-grid, I would expect not expect well-digging to remain popular.
Trees, hedges, native grasses and shrubs: the kinds of plant you'd probably consider "weeds" in US suburbia. Within cities, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraced_house, and there are villages in amongst the fields and forests of rural areas.
Even in Belgium, one of the highest density countries in the EU, most existing and newly built houses are semi-detached, with about twice as much semi-detached + detached houses as there are terraced houses.
In France, terraced homes are rather uncommon outside the North close to Belgium, and old city centers. In fact, I don't even know if we have a name for detached houses, as far as I know they're just called "a house" while a terraced house is a "city house".
So I don't have the numbers for all of the EU but I don't think most homes are actually terraced homes in the EU.
And people do have grass lawns, but only where grass actually grows without too much care needed. Where I come from on the coast grass doesn't grow well on the sandy ground and lawns are uncommon, but a few kilometres inland if you don't do anything you get a mostly-grass lawn, with a lot of clover, daisies and often orchids growing in it.
> It still makes sense to have a well because it is a waste to water the lawn with drinking water.
Watering the lawn is just a waste of water, period. Ground water is commonly used as the primary source of drinking water, so even if the water is being extracted from a well, it is pretty much drinking water.
This very much depends on the place. There are plenty of areas of Europe where groundwater at ordinary well depth is no longer potable and the community relies on a reservoir with a different source. So, if your property has an old well, all it is good for is watering a lawn or orchard, washing your car or bicycle, etc.
I’m curious: if the water isn’t considered potable, would you want to be watering plants with it? Is the contamination more often bacterial than chemical?
People all over the world water plants with water that is not potable itself due to bacterial or viral contamination. This is where the old traveler’s adage “Boil it, cook it, peel it, or forget it” comes from.
If the groundwater is not potable because of e.g. arsenic or pesticide contamination, I think that homeowners are usually aware of that and therefore are more likely to use the water only for washing purposes.
Right, I could have stated more explicitly. Watering possibly edible plants with pathogen polluted water seems okay. Watering them with chemically polluted water seems like maybe a way to ingest toxic stuff. Washing dishes seems dicey too.
Yeah that seems reasonable enough to me. I’ve seen parks and green spaces in Southern California that have warning signs about not drinking irrigation water.
My earlier comment was motivated by a concern that tapping a non-potable water source for one’s own family might bear health risks without more analysis of the state of that water. For all you know, even if you only use that water for plants, maybe you’re growing food with water high in arsenic and it’s accumulating in the food.
Lawns reduce the air and ground temperature significantly. Even if you have a shortage of water in your area, finding a way to maintain a natural lawn has benefits. That isn’t the same as maintaining a golf course, but watering a lawn to keep it from dying for a few peak-heat weeks is well worth it, in my opinion.
This is the next environmental movement i'd love to see, the end of lawns and acceptance of native landscapes all over the world, but especially the western world.
It is not as common to water one’s lawn in Poland. It’s not like the country doesn’t get enough rain, and most villagers don’t feel the need to show off perfect lawns to their neighbors as e.g. in the USA.
Don’t water the lawn (or fertilise or roundup etc.) in Australia: for some reason it stays green without it: buffalo grass is as tough as nails! Sometimes it goes yellow but it always comes back!
Lawns in the US consume as many resources as they do because the typical lawn you see isn't a species native to the US, instead it was imported from Europe. With the soil being different etc., it is not surprising lawns, especially when they're as big as in the US, require so many resources.
I went with a native grass and my watering is down to 1/4 what it was before that. the grass does go dormant and turn brown in the summer/colder winters though, so it's not as pretty but it is what it is, and HOA allows "xeroscaping"
imho that is the only sane way. The water consumption for keeping a lawn green in during the now all so common heatwaves is absurd and really not worth it considering the lawn will be fine once it starts raining again
Many lawns in the US do use grass native to that part of the US. Not all, but many. However grass goes dormant when it doesn't rain for a couple weeks and people don't like that brown look so they water even though the grass (either native or imported) doesn't need it. Likewise people don't like flowers and other weeds and so they apply a lot of chemicals to the lawn - but the grass doesn't need them.
TL;DR: lawns in the US do not need any resources. It is "perfect lawns" that need a lot of resources.
I think we'll see a similar scenario as what happened in many rural and semi-urban areas of India. Most folks use well water for their daily use, but still maintain an urban/central water connection in case of emergencies (especially as droughts are becoming more of a reality worldwide).
Well digging is still going strong - actually stronger, since people are now digging deeper wells as the water table is shrinking.
That does not appear to be the case. A friend of mine spent a considerable amount of money a few years ago to build a wastewater treatment system on his property. Then the gmina told him that, under new legislation, he would still have to connect his property to the common sewage system. This is something that he and many of his neighbours were reluctant to do, because it brings new monthly service charges. He tried to argue his case and managed to stall for several months, but eventually he was forced to do so lest he be fined.
I have heard villagers in Spain and Italy complaining about the same thing, so I assumed there was a new loi communitaire.
Not trying to ignore your point, I am aware gmina might try and force their own solutions without respect to the more general law (there's been cases resolved in favor of the common people in the past). If you have any more details why you absolutely have to connect to the municipal sewage system please let me know.
A sewage system doesn't work well without periodic flushes. Having too few houses connected to it means it is at risk of drying and clogging. Most probably when it was designed they took into account the number of houses is was supposed to collect waste water from. Anything less then that number would be risky for the whole system.
I did consider that price: it is negligible in Poland. The now-obligatory water and sewage connection in all villages brings service fees that people sometimes grumble about, but water itself doesn’t cost very much.
The first week I came to live in Guatemala from the USA 3 brothers from a nearby village dies of asphyxiation at the bottom of a hand dug well which had a generator running too close up above.
I have a large well for my water (machine bored - wells here have terrible recovery), when the pump went out a few years back I looked down the hole and decided no way will I climb down there. I bought a pump and used hoses and extension cords to lower it into the well from above, then a week latter hired someone to come out and do the proper install. They had the proper safety gear so they couldn't fall down the hole. More importantly they knew how to use the - I know where to buy the gear, but that is one case where improper usage will kill you before you find out you were wrong.
I'm going to declare a new law, a la Bettredge's Law: "When a small probability is claimed, without evidence, to be less than that of death by lightening strikes, it is safe to assume the small probability is in fact higher than the risk of death by lightening strikes".
Find me the evidence and I'll admit that my new law is invalid. :)
I don't need evidence to know that the odds of casualties falling into a modern well (that is a few inches in diameter) such as the one being drilled here are less than being hit by lightning (assuming lightning is possible).
I won't rule out the possibility of an ankle sprain.
The biggest risk of construction comes from handling the concrete rings. I haven't heard of a suffocation accident. These are much more common when people maintain their sanitation tanks.
I think it will solve itself as people move to steel pipes which are generally less labor intensive to drill. They also eliminate the danger of falling into the well.
This is really interesting, though I unfortunately don't read Polish.
For each ring deeper, do you dig out under the bottom ring until it slides down and another can be added to the top of the stack? That sounds terrifying having a whole stack of concrete shifting around above you.
I built such a well...
The concrete rings will just sloooowly slide down once there is room under them. If you dig evenly, they will just go down straight. Only a few centimeters at a time. This part does not feel dangerous. As a bonus,you can buy concrete rings with steps included, so you don't need to buy a 5m long ladder.
In historic well digging the walls needed to be secured with wooden planks or bricks and such after digging straight down. Huge risk of the walls falling in. This was a problem just generations ago... And all of the family had stories of grandfather's digging wells that collapsed and that the historic approach was dangerous.
With concrete rings, there is no danger of collapsing. And certainly, when placing a ring, noone should be standing inside!
But yes...
- It becomes a little claustrophobic when this becomes deep. I stopped at 4.5m and got used to it by the time we came that deep.
- I put a pipe in to blow fresh air to the bottom. This helps with the uneasy feeling of a possible bad smell
- there is a risk of dropping a bucket on the head. Use a proper rope, a proper knot, a proper bucket made for lifting and stop when the guy above needs a break
My grandfather was a "well witcher" (Appalachian roots here). Many believe that's woo woo or some kind of super power. The man was incredibly intelligent and resourceful and he had a reputation for finding water every single time he dropped the drill into the ground.
When I was a kid I used to go to sleep listening to stories of my dad and his dad driving around on a 2 ton truck with a 3 ton drill and how the brakes always went out. Somehow they always lived to tell the tale.
Haven't thought about this in a long time. Good memories.
My dad drilled water wells in the US after spending many years working on oil wells overseas. His clients would often hire witchers (water witches, water witchers, well witches - I think the distance from Appalachia to Montana clouded the specific vocabulary). You'd have this very old man dodder around the property with a pair of sticks, and when the sticks magically chose to pull together and cross, that's where you'd dig the well.
I do not recall whether the magical approach was any more successful than the traditional approach.
In most cases you can drill just about anywhere and find water. So any approach from random to looking at geological features (which you can gather from seismograph data, if needed set off an explosion in controlled locations...) will find water. The latter approach may find a specific place where a less deep well can work, but in most locations there isn't that much a difference (at least not among the reasonable places to drill your well - if you are willing to pay for miles of pipe you can maybe have a useful choice of location).
When I built my house in the country, the well driller insisted on witching. He said "we should drill right here." I said "No, move it 100 feet that way. Your spot is right in the middle of my future driveway."
"I can't guarantee we'll hit water there" he said.
Finding & Buying Your Place in the Country has a whole section on wells. The main key seems to be onsite when it is drilled, because otherwise they'll just leave after drilling one, even if it is dry.
When I was about 12 my dad wanted to do some work plumbing in the house but couldn’t find the stopcock to turn off the water. Figuring it was buried somewhere in the hedge he got me to dowse for the water line with a couple of bent coat hangers.
Waking back and forth across the front lawn the bent coat hangers crossed consistently along a line so he started digging. Unfortunately the pipe he holed with the garden fork was the gas supply and the day ended with the gas company coming around to patch the line. I don’t think we ever found the water stopcock.
Though we can’t explain it dowsing does seem to work. There is however no guarantee that what you find is what you were looking for…
I mean statistics may, if someone spent enough time, show that things are generally where they feel best being because a human like you put it there. also you have about a 50% give or take winning anything so leaving it to odds feels better than trying to push one way or another.
I consider myself a pretty cynical person, but I tried it myself to prove someone else wrong and I couldn't help but feel like it actually worked.
We were looking for a water pipe, not just sitting groundwater. The only explanation I could come up with was that for some reason a magnetic field was being created by the pipe underground. I don't remember if the water was flowing or not when we did it.
I feel silly even commenting this, but we truly did find the pipe exactly where I was standing when the rods pointed together.
Of course it's very possible that I unconsciously tilted my hands in the spot where I suspected the pipe would be. Even though I did make a conscious effort to not do exactly that, I wonder if there is some psychological factor in the phenomenon.
Slightly tangential but I've found it insightful: there are studies, e.g. [0], showing correlations between lifespan and date of birth. Causal factors could include for example seasonal viral infections, lesser amount of vitamin D in the winter, etc.
Of course, this tells nothing about well-witching, but illustrates that at least some old beliefs aren't as unreasonable as one might think.
Even without evaluating the quality of the study, I don't have a hard time accepting the notion that the season of your birth may affect your average lifespan by a few months. It is a very modest claim.
The claims of astrologers are not at all like this. They are vastly more specific.
Okay granted; my intent wasn't to justify astrology either, but merely to encourage prudence when dismissing "old ideas." To be clear, I'm not talking about modern astrology, but really about old beliefs that could have been built on repeated observations, but weirdly/poorly phrased.
In The Republic of Plato, there's this idea of rotation between political regimes[0], and it's explained by the way each generation treats the next one. Down to Earth example: think of overprotecting parents making their child unprepared for an ordinary adult life.
Now of course, this is again distant from the discourse of our favorite astrologers, but if you squint a little, there are conceptual similarities.
Thinking about it a little more, and on point to your original remark, I wonder if the fact that a considerable amount of people like to believe in astrology isn't tied to the same instinct that made old people personify everything and anything as Gods: a strong tendency to see order and intelligence in chaos.
After all, science is still about doing just this, minus the anthropomorphism. So, not so shocking: just human nature at works.
While I don't think this particular wikipedia page is especially concise, I do think it's a great jumping off point for links you will find interesting:
I first learned about the link between temporal lobe epilepsy and hyperreligiosity from Robert Sapolsky's Biology and Human Behavior. From your comments I think you'd find it as interesting as I did.
A Facebook friend was talking about how overwhelming and chaotic her life has been feeling lately and people were chiming in to say they were in the same boat and attributing it to the Mercury retro-whatever.
Must just be a coincidence that it's back-to-school season and everyone is transitioning out of their summer routines into school-mode.
Might not have been dowsing but a geoelectric survey of the inductive/capacitive/resistive variety. The BBC Time Team folks occasionally use these for non invasive surveys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lU9aRZK4j84&t=663s
In The Traveller's Tree by Patrick Leigh Fermor, a travelogue from the Caribbean, he gives an account of water divination. He initially sees it as some voodoo myth, and is taken aback when they repeatedly find water.
Ok, if I point at a random spot in the ground in an area that generally has water, and I said, "dig here and you will find water", and you put 1/5 a mile of pipe down into the earth and water comes up, am I some type of miracle? Would those people work in the desert? I think it's a lotto ticket that always wins.
I think there is a more functional and charitable read of this: not all of our senses are plumbed all the way through to our conscious mind at all times. small little hints (like minor changes in smell, relative humidity, maybe just pattern-matching on the lay of the land) are down in the noise, and pulling out your trusty sticks gives your subconscious a way to send a signal to your awareness.
Kinda like acupuncture - does my pulse really have seven levels that mean different things? I doubt it.. but a successful acupuncturist might still be able to diagnose "what hurts" using said technique, when really they've already picked up on other clues from your gait, posture, etc.
"subliminal" and "subconscious" are over-used and vague words, but we've all had the experience of wearing a new clothing item and receiving an uncommon number of compliments, including from strangers who wouldn't know it's new. I've always assumed we are unconsciously presenting the new thing with a bit of flair, and that equally-unconsciously draws the eye.
You have to be careful of what you mean by "does it actually work".
Does the dowsing find water hidden in a random spot or is the dowser tapping into subconscious knowledge about the land to find it. The parent is talking about the latter.
Look up "Ideomotor phenomenon" in your source. It's right above the pseudoscience bit.
It's not like subconscious knowledge must be valid subconscious knowledge. The ideomotor phenomenon is an expression of internal belief, which may be little different than a wild-ass guess.
There's no evidence that the dowser is tapping into subconscious knowledge in a way that gives results any better than - or different from - chance.
These people do work in the desert. I have a buddy that drills wells here in Arizona and he WILL NOT put a drill into the ground without a Witcher. I have a really hard time with "witching" from a logical POV, but my buddy and his $130k truck/equipment swear by it. I call that putting your money where your mouth is.
The test would be finding a spot where a witcher says there isn't water, and then drilling there.
There's water almost everywhere in the ground -- the questions are is there enough of it to meet the need? is it usable (ie: not contaminated with salt or toxic chemicals)?
the depth of the water table is fairly well known throughout the world, and it is not like a series of underwater rivers which are easily missed; the water table is called a "table" because it is very large and very flat.
if you are within 100 miles of a natural body of water, or in a flood plain, or anywhere that it rains semi-regularly, drilling will get you to a source of water.
Or as I suspect like where I grew up, if you dig down far enough you will hit water. The professional guys there would just ask "where do you want it?" and 99% of the time there was water there and not that far down.
I wondered how getting a permit in Switzerland would work.
According to some sources I found:
- You need to request a permit from your city and your canton's water and sewage department
- To get a permit, you need a "proof of utility", so you can't just dig a well for fun, it needs to bring some benefit.
- You need a written technical planning document as well, including an analysis on the energy- and cost-efficiency of your project
- If you want to drill down to the groundwater (for drinking water quality), you need additional analyses being done, to prove that the project conforms to standards and causes no harm.
It sure sounds fun to have your own well, but I think I'll stick to collecting rain water.
Where I work as a Realtor, it's generally possible to drill a well for domestic use. It will typically run about $20K and as we have a high water table, they generally hit water around 60 feet and will take the well down to around 250 feet if they want to "future proof" it. Deepest well in our area that I've heard of is around 900 feet and that was considered really rare / extreme.
Where homeowners become conflicted is that well gives them the rights to domestic use and to water a basic yard, but nothing beyond that. You are quickly in to "water rights" which can become complex and limiting. More and more we are seeing water masters (a state role) take away rights from landowners who are not fully using their water rights. For example, if the land was previously farmed but has now gone fallow and the water right has not been used, the state will revoke it - and there's a 0.0% chance of ever getting it back. This sometimes leads to cases where people (farmers) overuse their water to ensure they are demonstrating usage, but then of course that can lead to fines for overuse. No question water is going to be a defining issue in the American west for the foreseeable future.
I'm quite sympathetic to the overall trend. But nearly half those listed things are effectively optional things to protect himself or make his life easier - eg you do not need an LLC, but you surely do want one. Another near half are to protect others from himself as he is putting himself out there as a business, as he is employing workers or subjecting customers to his work. There could certainly be more small-business-friendly ways to handle these things [0], but earlier periods weren't solving them and at least now there is an attempt. So this particular critique doesn't ring true for me.
The proper comparison is looking at what it takes to do it for yourself or a friend. Of that list, that's probably just permit/inspection, which is hard to talk about generally because it's going to vary per locale. Although you really do want the backhoe.
[0] just spitballing an example, worker injury insurance could be provided more by the state from the general fund.
I don't think it would be worthwhile to make your own hydraulic drill if there are rental alternatives.
More specifically, around 1981 my Dad rented a drilling rig to supply the irrigation pump for our yard in Miami.
See, the city was phasing out septic systems, and had installed sewers to our neighborhood. They charged for sewer based on water consumed. By drilling a well he could avoid paying sewage fees for irrigation water.
I think he hit water at 8 feet, and put the well down to 12. This was Miami.
That's good advice for almost all tools. The average weekend warrior may never have been to their local tool rental shop, but it's worth checking out! You can rent just about anything, for very reasonable prices, and it tends to be pretty high quality/industrial stuff. For all the tools you only use one a year, it probably makes more financial sense to rent than buy.
But you can often buy cheaper than renting with the caveat of getting a cheaper brand. For most DIY I find the cheaper ones good enough, as long as you get
some online wisdom first to avoid the occasional turds being sold. Example:
chainsaw, drill, jet wash, pruning equipment etc.
> But you can often buy cheaper than renting with the caveat of getting a cheaper brand.
that heavily depends on the kind of tool and what the likelihood of you using this thing more than twice a year is. A chainsaw, drill, jetwash - very reasonable. Anything more specialiced, you're usually better off renting - especially as one could often use the instructions provided by the experts.
When the water table is shallow, but deeper than your Louboutins - which is much of Florida - you can drill a well yourself, at low cost.
After all, the technique only works for down to about 20 feet (there's another page on how to extend that to 30 feet), and 7 of the 26 listed success stories are from Florida.
In most of the world you can drill down 20 feet and find water. It might or might not be safe to drink. It might or might not be a lot of water, but even in deserts you commonly can find it that shallow.
Many places allow for dual meters: one water meter that is used for irrigation and another for water that ultimately goes for waste treatment. In places with abundant water, e.g. places where this drilling technique would work, the water is typically practically free and the “water bill” is mostly a sewer bill.
Where I live, they base the sewage fees off water usage during the winter. Since few people water their yards then, it mostly takes irrigation out of the equation.
Bonus: it spurs you to think about conservation. When your 3-month wastewater averaging period starts, you know that any water you save will cut costs for the whole year.
Same here and I've thought about this, but the cost savings of doing less winter laundry for example are in the end miniscule. We pay way more for water than for sewer.
This is interesting. Part of my life was working with a water well driller running a rig for my grand-father's business a long time ago. The technique is virtually identical but with a hydraulic lift for running the drill and uses compressed air to clear the bore.
The first step was to find the location and park the drilling rig so it wouldn't sink once the well was dug. Then you'd raise the drill arm, attach a section of pipe and the drill head. You'd lower it down into a round flange that had an opening to one side where all of the cuttings blew out. My job was to shovel the cuttings into a trench to direct water flow once you hit the water line. It was critical to keep water from getting under the tires of the rig.
Each section of pipe is 20 feet long and as you drill in you detach the rig head, raise it, get another section of pipe from a rotating carousel and then start grinding again. Once done you pull all the pipe by basically doing the reverse and then perform a similar operation to push casing down into the hole. When the rig pulls away you have a round hole in the ground ready to have another truck come in to insert an electric pump with all the wiring. Then you box everything up at the top and say job done.
Oil field drilling is pretty similar as well but the rigs are vastly larger and move way more earth much faster. My dad worked on a rough necking crew and I've been exposed to the oil and gas industry most of my life so this is an interesting tangent.
I tried this years ago and it ended in failure. From what I learned it seems like your soil down to the level you want to drill to has to be basically 100% silt/sand/clay. In most areas there are various pebbles, some up to the the size of a dime or so, and what I found was smaller particles would wash up and out of the hole, but these pebbles would accumulate on the bottom.
I switched from using low-volume water sources to a 1.5HP well pump pulling from a swimming pool. The pool would empty in about 20 minutes, and I would then have to wait for it to refill from a regular hose. However, while this very high water volume was able to clear the pebbles (which is how I know the floor of the hole was covered with pebbles at all, it was maybe 12 feet down at that point), there was diminishing returns and eventually the pebbles no longer cleared the top.
I'm sure I was doing something completely wrong, in the end if you have sandy/silty/clay soil you can just buy a sand point (aka driven point) and sledgehammer it down as deep as you need to go. It's a lot more heavy labor but it is also almost certain to work.
I'm doing a hammer driven well point right now, been pounding for 3 weeks nearly everyday. I get about 1 inch per day exhausting myself. I'm maybe 9 feet down, no water yet. I am getting a lot stonger and it gets eaier everyday. Probably have 20+ hours into this stupid thing already :(
I think the idea behind doing it yourself is that you don’t need a permit. In the USA, while permits are technically required for a lot of things, the law is widely ignored, and enforcement is lax to nonexistent. Hell most of the licensed contractors I hire (electric, plumbing, etc) don’t bother to pull permits, even for new work.
You will likely have issues if you ever try to sell property with an unpermitted well. FHA loans have restrictions on the well as do many local jurisdictions that may refuse to convey the property if the well isn’t up to code. My local jurisdiction won’t block the sale but will write an alarming letter to the seller. In the case of a new build or major remodel, you will not be able to get a certificate of occupancy without a state and county verified well here.
> Hell most of the licensed contractors I hire (electric, plumbing, etc) don’t bother to pull permits, even for new work.
Yeah, it’s your responsibility as a homeowner to get the permit (either get it yourself or see that the contractor does). Even if you don’t think the permit inspectors are doing anything in terms of quality control, the permit helps you to pass inspections as part of the sale process and will limit your insurance exposure if there’s ever an issue. There’s probably fine print in your insurance contract saying that all work shall be permitted as required.
Yeah, it doesn't take a genius inspector to take the as built plans, the list of work permits, and see if that explains current state of the house. And then there's the whole issue of mandatory disclosure forms and how forthcoming you are on those and if whatever you put down aligns with the inspectors find.
That assumes there are as built plans. I live in an area of the US with a lot of old houses and there certainly aren't as built plans for 100-200+ year old houses or a string of permits for any substantial work.
(Well/septic tend to get more scrutiny at a sale but the status of old renovations/remodels in general are often pretty opaque.)
If too many people start doing it, it becomes an issue of overdrawing groundwater. This leads to an arms race of digging ever deeper wells to reach the remaining groundwater, and on top of that starts leading to ground subsidence as ground formerly full of water dries out and compacts.
Off the top of my head, there is massive groundwater subsidence in the Central Valley of California, Mexico City, and Jakarta due to this issue, at rates measured in feet per year. This makes the land prone to flooding, and also damages buildings and infrastructure since the subsidence is generally not evenly spread out.
Importantly, in case it wasn't obvious to readers, hydrocompaction cannot be undone in any meaningful way. Once the compaction happens, water will no longer, and will never again, flow in the compacted area.
I was looking into this DIY approach and it is not allowed in my county. Some of the justification is that improperly cased wells can allow backflow contamination of the larger water supply, affecting other nearby water sources. I'm not sure how likely this is as I have limited knowledge of the subject.
At least in my state (Washington), electricians and plumbers licenses include an annual permit which covers all the work they do during that year. It's only the trades that don't have a licensing program (or are only licensed as "general contractor") that need a separate permit for each job instead of one big one that covers all their work for the year.
And today I am reminded that people in many places must get the state’s permission to build, repair, or improve their shelter, to grow food, to collect rainwater, to dig a well.
On property they “own”.
You’re literally asking the states permission to have the basic things needed for human survival- shelter, food, and water.
While this makes sense to me for a business or an organisation, it strikes me as unconscionable for a private individual to have to get permission from the state to survive.
The issue is "water rights". In Western states, somebody owns that water already. The rain might fall on your house, but it normally flows into some creek/stream/river where the legal and moral rights to that water belong to someone else. Capturing that water is legally considered theft. In Colorado, for example, every bit of river water was allocated to someone before Colorado became a state.
One book that covers the history of water projects in the US is Cadillac Desert [0]. We have this cultural myth that all we need is a little more water to make the desert bloom. And as a country, we've wasted trillions of dollars diverting rivers for agricultural use. Agricultural users of water pay almost nothing for their water while using enormous amounts of taxpayer funding to do so. Utah and Arizona have recently had droughts where water consumption by private citizens was limited.
There are several crops that use enormous amounts of water, the one receiving attention is alfalfa. 82% of Utah's water is consumed by agriculture. The UT governor owns a farm that grows alfalfa for export. Instead of cutting back on his own farm's water consumption, he's been on radio & TV telling Utahns to pray for rain. Arizona has had some recent news stories about Saudi companies growing alfalfa in AZ and exporting the hay to Saudi Arabia. Alfalfa consumes so much water that growing it in Saudi Arabia is illegal. Amusingly, `alfalfa` is an Arabic word. The issue with AZ & UT is that there is plenty of taxpayer subsidized water to grow alfalfa for export while simultaneously rationing residential water consumption.
>Because you alter things outside of your perimeter.
Indeed, but you need a permit for a lot of things contained within your property too. Technically, I need a permit to change my front door. Kinda silly, mostly ignored by people, which is probably a worse outcome.
Homes can have neighboring properties and non-owner occupants and there are third-party fire risk concerns with both. It is not good if people build homes which are at risk of spreading fire to neighboring properties, or at risk of harming occupants in case of a fire.
Building codes are a big reason we don't have nearly as many events called "the great fire of [city]" in the 21st century.
Or, you know, people understand that their actions have consequences on others and living in an organized society is far better than the alternative. We're not endlessly settling an untapped frontier that exists solely in our heads.
I understand the sentiment but when you have this many people living close together, somebody has to be the adult to make sure things continue to work for everybody.
Ownership that is regulate and enforced by the state; if you own it according to the rules, you use it according to the rules. If you want to do something else, you can step outside the rules and best of luck to you.
> you can step outside the rules and best of luck to you.
This is why I cannot understand how the 'sovereign citizen' nonsense is at all appealing to anybody. If I'm my own boss and not morally subject to society's rules, how is it not fair game then for society to completely ignore my desires and needs? Like, ok, lets say our courts have no jurisdiction over you, but then it also follows that we can just shoot you dead where you stand and move on with our society. I get that it feels unfair to be born into rules you didn't agree to, but a second's reflection makes it obvious the other alternative is not at all a good one.
> how is it not fair game then for society to completely ignore my desires and needs?
Best I can tell, it already does this. Not saying I believe the lunatic sovereign citizen horseshit, about how if they spell my name in all uppercase letters on the paperwork, I'm not subject to courts of law...
But yeh, they're definitely completely ignoring my desires and needs. Yours too. Some people are just slow to catch on.
I'm unconvinced. I like electricity and water I can drink and all that sort of thing, and society seems to be doing a pretty good job of providing that. Certainly enough of it for my own needs right here in my house.
That was the attitude of the dude down the road from me who started his own impromptu pig farm. The folks who are outraged by what they can't do on their own land often also are the folks who don't think beyond step 1 and don't care if their pig shit stinks and runs off everywhere.
It does depend on location. My town, for example, is a "right to farm" community which--while it doesn't give you carte blanche to do anything you want that's agriculture-related on your property--does give fairly broad latitude.
Local city allows chickens (just a few) and out by me some towns allow a lot more, but there's also proper space to do those things.
Pig farm guy was right on the border and he did NOT have enough space for a bunch of pigs. Thankfully the town already had rules about pigs. Pig farms STINK.
> it strikes me as unconscionable for a private individual to have to get permission from the state to survive.
It would be nice to be free of the state. But how do we deal with the Tragedy of the Commons? How do we make hidden externalities visible & accurately priced?
It seems like the population is too high in most places to be able to tolerate people doing their own thing, with their own property. Not sustainable unfortunately.
At this point, "private ownership" is fading away. Eventually, maybe a hundred of years from now, we'll all be leasing our land from the government, and perhaps even leasing our privileges.
There's a philosophical question here, which is that as science and technology get better and our ability to measure things improve, the hidden externalities become less and less hidden. Nobody told Grok the caveman not to burn sticks in his cave for warmth, out of concern for releasing CO2 and particulate matter; but nowadays it's frowned upon to use a wood pellet furnace instead of electric heat, for example.
Existence itself is an externality, since everything any living organism does affects every other living organism, however minutely. There probably exists some amount of externalities that we have to choose to ignore.
Depends on what you mean by pretty much anywhere. Outside of the actual cities in Alaska for example you won’t find many restrictions. Many countries in the developing world also are essentially unregulated.
We had the idea to drill one to here in Germany, but having drilled it doesn‘t mean you can use it as long as you please. Ground water levels are falling and eventually it will be forbidden.
But we also have a 13k liter cistern and with drip irrigation it holds reasonably long.
Well permit requirements are highly variable. As I understand it, in surprisingly large parts of California, the permit is almost automatic. In other parts of California, there are more complex regulations and sometimes even requirements to meter and pay for (!) well water usage. Cough, Santa Clara, cough.
I’d actually be all in favor, except that the rate for non-agricultural users seems to be over 10x the rate for agricultural users.
It is nice to get that many details on a single drilling method. But keep in mind - there are many more techniques for making your own well. Some might be better suited depending on the conditions.
There are hand operated drills, 150mm diameter with extension rods up to 10-15m long. If it works for your soil, then this is less messy.
I went with digging and a different type of dug well "Schachtbrunnen". I laid a pre-fabricated concrete ring on the ground and started digging inside until it sank into the ground. When it was level, I put the next ring on top. No special tool needed, a shovel, a bucket, some rope, patience and certainly a permit.
I helped my Dad doing just that ! It was fairly easy, it just need patience. It's South West France, in an area with sandy soil. All it took was ropes, shovels and buckets. We connected it to drain pipe buried in the garden, to capture the winter rain water. The water is used for outdoor cleaning, gardening.
I went to 4.5m - the rings did not slide easily any more as we paused for a year. If you work on it right away, you can go much further
I went with an inner diameter of 1m, this is fine for a small shovel, a pump, a small jackhammer.
Concrete rings are used all the time in road construction work. I don't see a risk of collapse with those when stacking carefully. Even if one ring were to get a crack, where should it go? I felt safe in this regard
Yes - shovel and bucket.
I took 50cm rings each, for a total of 9 for 4.5m. They weigh about 300kg each and could be rolled into the garden.
I got some scaffolding pipes and built a "gantry" over my hole. We could lower them by attaching a small chain operated pulley.
I tried to use this to drill a well some years ago on the west coast of Florida near the ocean. Worked great through the sand about 20 feet. Then we hit a shale deposit. There was no getting through it. Some pro well drillers came and couldn't make it through either. The neighbor drilled his own well a couple years prior and told us the secret. Blasting caps. We gave up.
The good news is that the shale was determined to be frackable, so you were able to sell hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil and drive to Beverly Hills in your ancient jalopy
Usually you pull your spendy drill string out of the ground then lower a charge down the hole to fracture whatever layer is giving you trouble. Turning your drill bit into a fragmentation grenade tends not to be overly productive.
The problem is if that leads to water contamination, all it takes some of these homemade drillers to contaminate it “by mistake” with gasoline, oil, or even chemicals, with all what it means to environment and people using the same water.
I did, but accidents happen, those are usually farmers and aren’t trained engineers with all safety measures, someone could have an oil tank nearby and someone/car bump into it or similar scenarios.
In California, that legally drilled well has a sealed cap and a concrete pad at the top. It’s quite unlikely for anything to spill down it unless there is a flood higher than the cap.
So the concern is that a farmer will drill the well, pull up the drill head, then accidentally spill a tank of oil then the oil will go down the hole and... contaminate the hole?
In short, yes. The hole for the well works both ways; it's a fast track for any surface-level pollutants to get into the groundwater, contaminating it for everyone.
Local law may require barriers to prevent this, such as an elevated concrete pad at the top of the well. This how-to guide didn't mention anything like that. Permits help ensure that important steps aren't skipped.
You should be 100 times more worried about fertilizer runoff into storm drains than some random farmer drilling a well and then ruining it by pouring used motor oil into it.
The house I live in has a well. 400 feet deep (why? long story).
The thing to be aware of is that there's a few different kinds of additives you might need for well water.
The most usual is water softener. Ours isn't too hard, but what we do have is hydrogen sulphate from bacteria in the soil - it requires hydrogen peroxide to make the water smell neutral and palatable.
Water softeners are common, but they are regional. In some places the ground water is naturally soft and you don't need one. In others you need them. One house I lived in you needed an iron filter, but most people have never heard of such a thing There are lots of other devices in the water treatment catalog that you might or might not need. Only a real water test can tell.
I had an issue with hydrogen sulfide bacteria in my well water system. If I didn't run any water for a couple days (like, say, I went away for the weekend), I'd get a terrible sulfur smell to my water. When my well pump failed, I took the opportunity while the well head was off to dump a bunch of bleach down the well. Haven't had a problem in years now.
Is this for drinking water? And what depths can be reached with this method? I wish these were stated more clearly; I’m guessing “not drinking”, based on:
> It is great for saving money on watering your lawn and irrigating a garden.
Off topic: as a non native English speaker, the title made me pause. As in, why would I want to drill my water and do it well?… oh, water well, right.
They state it is for irrigation only. You can use the same technique for drinking water in some places, but it really depends on local soil conditions (meaning even if your neighbor has safe water you might not get safe water!) and the care taking when drilling the well. If you do try this, after drilling and sealing the well you chlorinate the water (to kill anything you introduced), wait a week, then have a proper lab test, if the lab says it is safe to drink you are fine. The lab test should be repeated every 3 months (almost nobody does, but that is what the labs tell you)
You can sometimes work around this by installing filters (RO and otherwise), and UV lights. However you need lab results to tell you what filters to install, and you need to keep those filters maintained.
This particular method of drilling a well works in sandy soil or clay where the water table isn't very deep. If you're in mountains or on any topology with bedrock you'll need better equipment, particularly a carbide or diamond tipped bit. And you'll be drilling potentially hundreds of feet. Something like this would most certainly not work in Colorado, it would probably work in Florida or Louisiana.
I certainly wouldn't drink water out of a shallow well most places. It is worth every penny to get someone to drill a 200 foot well and not have to worry about contamination for drinking.
Shrinking aquifers and neighbors drilling wells just a bit deeper than their neighbor's wells have contributed to a long-standing conflict over water access, see Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner for the historical origins of conflicts.
"Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting!" - Mark Twain
This is equivalent to people fretting over using plastic drinking straws when certain industrial uses are exempt from environmental laws. The vast, vast majority of aquifer depletion is for impractical crops that should never be grown where they are and wouldn’t be if our water rights laws made any sense.
You tapping in one of these wells means very little in the context of this important topic.
If you live in a dry, western state, there’s a 100% chance this won’t work. I live in the Southwest, and outside of some exceptions wells go down a thousand feet or more. You ain’t doing that without heavy equipment.
I live in Switzerland and my house is build on a rock, some of the foundation is actually rock and not concrete but it's old from 1750. So that drilling technique is not for my yard.
But, this lead me to think, is non rock ground frequent in urbanized area? Is rock ground like my place more like the exception? I'm used to it so I thought it was the norm, but I guess it is not.
Site must have received an HN hug of death, so not sure what method it reccomends.
There's a (university research group?) called WOT that uploads videos to Youtube with different low cost/low tech techniques, my favorite one being with a hand drill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQRhsoSCXvg
My 5 year plan includes building a shed with power, then adding a self driven well and adding the capacity to switch irrigation off city water to the shed source (tm). In the northeast so no real water concerns here
In my days of fighting paranormal activities and beliefs (homeopathy, wells witchers, ...) we were usually told that we do not have open minds and do not accept anything outside of our limited science.
Then, we were very much interested in seeing these unusual things happening. As I mentioned it in a previous comment, I declared at the radio that I would immediately switch my PhD topic (in physics) to study them. Because, you know, Nobel prize. I did not get to see anything unusual, did a uneventful PhD and, well, do not have said Nobel prize.
But the important thing was: I wanted to measure. To have an experiment where what was unusual would be measurable. This means that tests with well diggers were a complete failure when they were asked to find water in controlled conditions.
OTOH, they were good when in the wild because (probably) they could read the landscape and see signs of water (conscientiously or not).
Same with homeopathy: when I have a headache I get an aspirin and before it had time to reach my stomach I feel better. I also once swam away from what I thought were sharks and I probably broke a swimming record because my arms were moving like a blender.
This is to say that scientists do not limi themselves - they just want to see and measure something to say that this is a thing. Unfortunately as soon as they do it the whole paranormal things fall apart. But we are still hoping.
I was looking at this Polish Company selling augers, but I checked local bore records and they were 80m for the aquifer and they were hitting rock pretty quickly in their samples even if I went for ground water - https://www.ebay.com/str/drillpartnerofficialstore
> My concern here is ground water will have septic contamination, don't know if that's stupid or not.
It's not just that, dug and shallow wells are also getting surface water run-off -- basically anything on the ground in the immediate area or uphill. There's actually an acronym for this: GWUDI (Groundwater under the direct influence [of surface water]). They're highly susceptible to seasonal changes and rain. The worst ones are people that in a lower-lying area than nearby farms -- nitrates (from animal feces and fertilizers) and pesticides are all extremely expensive to remove from water.
When you do a drilled well, the annular space (the hole around the casing) actually has to be sealed (with bentonite) to prevent surface water from getting directly into the well and aquifer. I see no mention of this in the article.
Where I live (Ontario Canada) there are environmental laws protecting ground water. Badly done wells can actually contaminate a huge area and affect other people's wells and drinking water.
> My concern here is ground water will have septic contamination, don't know if that's stupid or not.
It isn't stupid concern for drinking water. You could have neighbours with septic tanks leaking, cesspools or using crazy amounts of roundup for their lawn.
But for watering flowers, washing and cleaning ground water is usually OK. You can always make a test of water quality at local authority...
Aquifier water is of good quality but getting to it might be expensive.
Fortunately most dirt is an excellent filter for septic waste. The law requires 40 (double check this number for where you live) of distance between a septic system and a well because at that distance the water that gets through is safe to drink without any more treatment. It doesn't matter how bad your septic system is installed, the 40 feet distance makes it safe.
Note that I said most dirt above. There are types of soil that act more like pipes and so raw sewage from a leaking septic system has been found many miles away. Check with a local expert to see what soil you have to deal with.
What exactly is so terrible as long as you're willing to take a small to moderate risk of getting a PVC pipe stuck in the ground and keep in mind the presented cautions -- consider the water irrigation-only/non-potable until tested (possibly even if tested, although that's not what the site says)?
(1984) https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/d...
> Some people ... got their rig stuck three different times in their first well! As they wrote, “We recognize that many of our problems are due to our inexperience …. But our inexperience is not much different from yours.”
They have many other articles on the subject; but I'm fond of linking to this one in particular.
I helped dig that well. And several others. The fellow in the middle of the picture there is my dad.
Using the gantry rig pictured in the article was much easier than just the engine unit (much like a post hole digger they sell in stores now). One of our crew was a gifted machinist who ran that up after we bent the several pipes trying to dig without bracing.