The purpose of the renewable energy house is to demonstrate that everything needed can come from the environment in a way that is not environmentally harmful. Distributed water systems such as cities and towns have are an effective way to provide water to large groups of people. However, for a small household that is conservative with water use, city water can be quite expensive. There are also losses in the distribution pipes and a large amount of electrical energy is used in the pumping, pressurizing, filtering, etc.
Fortunately, the water table here at Winter Lake is close to the surface. The soil is a very compact clay, with no large rocks. The clay has a large number of small pieces of coal in the shape of roots and plant stems. These pieces of coal act as little water channels. So I decided to provide my water needs for the little house from a shallow well. Here in Oregon, a well twelve feet deep or shallower has no requirements for licensing, inspection or registration. So I made the decision the keep the well under twelve feet. The water table is stable all year at around four feet, so that gives a standing head of eight feet of water in the well. With a six inch well casing, that translates to 1.57 gallons of standing water per vertical foot. With a standing head of eight feet, that is 12.56 gallons of water in the well casing. When the water in the fill gravel is taken into account, that will be around twenty gallons of water storage in the ground. (I wound up using a 4" well casing, so the in-ground storage is considerably less.)
I have dug several wells by hand before. It is a very difficult, time consuming job. The advantage of a hand dug well is water storage. Since they are usually around four feet in diameter, there is a huge amount of in ground water storage. I will not have a need for a lot of water, so I decided to drill the well. In keeping with the Winter Lake philosophy, the well must be drilled by hand. The solution was a simple farm hand tool. It is an auger style post hole digger. Here is a picture of the post hole digger I got for this project. It cost me just a little over $50.00. Most hardware stores carry these tools. The procedure is quite simple. First, the soil must be rock free. A rock as small as two inches in diameter can stop the whole project. Fortunately, after about one and a half feet down, my soil has no rocks to speak of. It is also a hard clay that does not ooze into the hole, making for a stable bore. Many types of soil can be drilled using this set up.
To start, you simply place the digger where you want the well and start turning it in a clockwise direction. Only go clockwise, since going counterclockwise will unscrew the joints and you will lose the tool down the bore. When the auger is full of soil, you pull it back up and empty it. Back in the hole, turn, up, empty, back in. On and on and on. When you have drilled down to where the post hole digger is about a foot out of the ground, like this, pull it out and take the head off. The head simply unscrews from the handle. Use a couple of pipe wrenches to remove the head. Most of these diggers use a standard 3/4 inch pipe and standard threads to attach the head to the handle. Get a four foot long piece of 3/4 inch black iron pipe with threads on both ends and a 3/4 inch coupler. They will look like this. Screw the pipe into the digger head and screw the handle into the pipe coupler. Tighten them with the wrenches and the process starts all over again. When you have drilled down to the end of the handle, add another pipe and coupler. In this way, you can drill quite a ways in a surprisingly short period of time.
Augered wells have been drilled that are thousands of feet deep. In old China, families worked on augered wells for years at a time. After the bore is deeper than about ten feet, a support must be used to keep the pipe vertical when removing and inserting the digger into the bore. This can be a simple tripod setup on which to rest the drill pipe. I used a rafter to support my drill rig. I can pull up an auger full of mud and water from a bore twenty five feet deep, but after that, it is a two person job, or you need to rig some type of lifting device. Since this well is only twelve feet deep, pulling the digger is not a real challenge. Keep the bore vertical as you drill.
After you reach the depth you want, pump or bail the mud out of the bore hole. Let it fill back up and pump it out again a couple of times. This will clean the soil around the hole of fine, loose mud. This will give a clean well. Drill a large number of small holes in a four inch plastic plumbing pipe. Glue a cap on the bottom of the pipe and drill a bunch of holes in it. Unfortunately, I forgot to get pictures of the assembled pipe. Glue a coupler to the pipe and add another pipe to it. The plastic plumbing pipe assembly should be at least a foot longer than the depth of the bore. Pour three inches of pea gravel down the bore for the plastic pipe to ride on. Raise the pipe over the bore and gently slide it in. Do not disturb the side of the bore or you will have loose mud in the bottom. Pour pea gravel around the plastic pipe assembly until you get two feet from the top. Then seal the bore with heavy, sticky clay to keep out surface water. The well itself is now finished. Cap the well casing with a cap. DO NOT GLUE IT ON! The cap will keep junk out of the well. It will look like this. Place a bucket over the casing temporarily to protect it.
To find out how much water the well produces, pump it down to a certain depth and time how long it takes to fill back up. In this well, the bore is nine inches in diameter. That gives roughly 3.5 gallons a foot. I pumped it down two feet and timed its recovery. It recovered the two feet, which is seven gallons, in two minutes and twelve seconds, which is very close to three gallons a minute. That is a respectable amount of water. The well will yield 4320 gallons a day, which is way more than I need. This is at the surface. Deeper down, the well flows much stronger, so the well is a success by any measure.
These shallow wells are almost certain to be contaminated with bad little critters. I have had my well tested for a wide range of chemicals. There are no bad chemicals to speak of, but it almost certainly has microbes in it. I will first settle the water and then filter it. I will use a filter that gets all the critters out. I will not drink the water, but will use it for all other purposes. My drinking water will come from a rain harvest system.
| Winter Lake Pages |
| Campus Description |
| Contact Information |
| Renewable Energy |
| Financial Thoughts |
| Blogs |
| E-zine Articles |
| Research Summaries |
| Ongoing Research Projects |
| Water Systems |
| Wastewater Systems |
| Home |
| Links to other good sites |
| Site Map |
