Pounding a Well - Part 4

It was one busy weekend. After digging and digging, it was finally time to set the casing to keep the well pit from falling in amongst itself. My original plan was to use a 3 foot culvert set up on end for this. After pricing culverts out, it was a little more cost prohibitive than what I was willing to spend. After some thought, my cousin suggest using an old 500 gallon propane tank that had been given to him. The tank was built in the fifties according to the tag on it. It had newer fittings from whenever it had last been used, but it was empty. The first thing I had to do was remove the fittings from the tank. Once that was done, you could still smell the propane/raw cabbage smell inside. Before cutting it apart, I filled the tank with water. Its surprising how long it can take to fill 500 gallons. The water displaces the gas fumes so there is no chance of explosion. Once filled, I used a chop saw and cut off one of the rounded ends of the tank. Once that was off and the water had spilled out, you are now safe enough to use a torch and so I cut off the other end (torch works faster than the chop saw in my opinion). The end result of this work was a little over 3 foot culvert made of 1/4 inch steel about 8 feet in length; it will never rot in the ground in my lifetime.

After getting the propane tank converted into a culvert, I then hauled it to the well on a trailer and man handled it off. I had dug the well hole by hand, but its the time of year now where it has been snowing already on and off and the days are getting cold. The clock is winning out, meaning that there is no way I can dig the trench by hand before the ground is frozen solid. To expedite matters I broke down and opted to pay a little cash and called in a friend with a small utility excavator who helped me set the culvert in the well pit over the shallow well pump. He also trenched the water line to the trailer, digging down six feet to get below the frost line. Once he was loaded and heading home to watch football for the rest of the day, my real work began.

I had been given a length of new 1 inch water line that was left over from a previous construction project. I also had a length of UF-B four wire electric wire. I laid these two out along the floor of the trench and taped them together every few feet. I stuck one end into the side of the culvert where I torched a hole where it will connect to the pressure tank and shallow well pump. The other end I fed up into the the crawl space under the trailer after removing some of the skirting to see what I was doing.

Up at the trailer end where the pipe runs out of the ground I put on three wraps of styrofoam pipe wrap, taping it up along the way. This is where I left off, the plans are to lay some 2 inch high dense styrofoam on the outside of the pipe to further protect it from freezing. I also still need to decide where I am going exactly with it in the house.

Pounding a Well - Part 3

This past weekend the real work started. Having struck water, it was now a matter of being able to pump that water. Shallow well pumps will only lift water 26 feet where I am located in the world. I am not sure of the exact math involved, but it has to do with atmospheric pressure and sea level and apparently there is a limit you can lift water by vacuum, which the shallow well pump creates to move the water up the pipe, through the impeller and out to the house.

Being that I have 31 feet of pipe in the ground to the top of the water, I had need to get down to the 25 foot level. This meant digging down several feet to the next coupling, or one pipe length which is 6 feet, and removing the pipe at that point and installing a check valve and strt elbow along with the shallow well pump. Digging a hole roughly five feet wide and several feet deep is not an easy process. The top foot was soil and sand, but the lower part is all hard pan. Not fun. Using a shovel and a bucket to haul dirt back up a ladder, I spent Sat. and Sun. digging to china. The pictures really don't do the hole justice. The plan is I will be putting a three foot culvert up on end to serve as a well pit. At the bottom of the pit will be the pump. Tonight will be the test to see if the well will pump water.

Pounding a Well-Part 2

After a little bit of a hiatus I got back to working on pounding the well. This time I got the tractor set up to help with the manual labor part of lifting the pounding weight for me. This involves blocking the tractor in place and jacking up the rear tractor tire that has a auto tire rim welded on the outside of the tractor wheel rim. With the tractor in 1st gear, running slow, you wrap the rope around the rim and pull it taught which in turn lifts the weight to the desired height and when you let the rope go slack the weight falls. By doing this process over and over you can proceed to sink 2 inch well pipe into the ground at a fairly efficient rate of 1/16 to 1/4 each hit dependent of the type of ground you are pounding through.

The well point is placed into the ground first. This is an item you can pick up from most hardware stores. It has a point on it for driving into the ground and is slotted along its length and protected by a screen for water to pass into it without sand following. Five foot lengths of 60 gauge 2 inch galvanized well pipe are added to this drive point. These are joined by couplings and you countinue to add pipe as you pound the well into the ground. Each joint has pipe compound brushed on the threads to create a proper seal. After you have the well point and first couple of lengths of pipe in the ground you then add water to the pipe. This is done for the purpose of letting you know when you have reached water. The concept is that once you have reached water, the water that is in the pipe will wash down since water seeks its own level. As you pound the well you want to stop every so often to check this water level and to turn the pipe as its going into the ground with a wrench so that you can keep the couplings and drive cap tight so you dont damage threads which can become loose from the pounding process. A drive cap completes this pipe assembly, this is to keep the top most threads from being damaged by the drive weight.

I sweated through nearly thirty two feet of laborious pounding of anywhere from 1/16 to 1/4 inch of pipe at a time and stopping to make sure the pipe is tight and the water level is still up and not dropped out. At a little over thirty two feet of pipe in the ground I noticed that the pounding suddenly became easier and I could blatently see the pipe dropping at least a whole inch with evey hit. The sound of the ringing from the pipe from the weight hitting it had changed also and so I stopped and swung the weight off and removed the pounding cap-the water was gone. Excitement! But still not done. I filled the pipe up again and unfortunately water stayed up in it which showed it was not rushing out to seek its own level-disappointment! But wait, it was ever slowly dropping.

I took a brief break and called a cousin of mine who is knowledgable in all things worldly. He was surpirised and figured that either I was getting close, or now that i was in sand (plainly determined from how easy the pipe was dropping now) the water was saturating the sand. He counseled pounding a little more and see what happened. With these words and being excited, I rigged everything up and continued to pound another four inches. I checked the pipe again and once again it was totally empty. I tried filling the pipe with the hose but unlike before, the pipe was not going to hold any water. I pumped many gallons in, far more than a thirty three foot 2 inch pipe could hold on its own and it would not fill. I had struck water!

I lowered a weighted string down to the bottom of the pipe and found that there is two feet of water at the bottom of the pipe. I have been told that is a very good level. Research that I have done on the internet has turned up very little to support to this old farmer's statement though. Next I have to pump the well clean of the sand that is left in the pipe from pounding and see what kind of flow I have and quality of the water itself. The results of that adventure will be in a future post.

Chicken Coop Part 1

A few weeks ago I started construction of a chicken coop that we plan to start using next spring once the snows recede. As with most of the things I start up here in the woods, this structure reuses alot of materials from past projects or buildings. In this case, I pulled off of the paintball field an old paintball fort that had been part of one of the flag stations. It was never built straight or square when I first built it since it was more a prop and shield against paintballs.

Once I had pulled it up into the driveway I removed the OSB sides that were pretty much rotted along with adding and replacing the 2x4 frame. For a project like this I used rough cut 2x4's from the family mill. I replaced boards from the roof that were rotten also. The plan is to re-use white siding I have collected for the roof (Much like what I did with the wood stove) and then use some good treated plywood for the walls that I will need to purchase in the near future. The end result will be painted barn red, but that is a little ways off yet.

After strengthening the old fort, I spent some time clearing off the area where the coop would sit. This I placed not to far off the driveway and near where the future garage will sit, though not so near since I currently have my trailer in that spot while I build the new house. After chainsawing and hauling brush to a pile that will be burned later this fall, I used the good ol"F150 to skid the coop to its new home. With a bar and a come-along, I positioned the building where I wanted it and then leveled it and squared it up. After that, I squared up the corners of the pen where the fence will be and dug out those holes with a post hole digger. Once done, I put in some solid fence posts that I had brought with me from my older property when I moved. Onto these I attached treated 2x4's that were 12 feet in length for the top of the fence. Onto this structure I attached the welded poultry fence I picked up from Menards with some fence staples.

So far so good. Next in the plans is putting the steel on the roof and putting the siding on the building.

The Little Things

While I have been slowly pounding the well, I have also spent time working on some other things around the house. These are not the best of pictures, but I took some time to get some treated lumber and built a clothesline. Nothing to fancy, but one of those little planed for things that I have finally gotten around to building.

Besides a clothesline, I also have been cutting and splitting wood in preparation of winter. I still have alot to go, but the pile is slowly growing.

Pounding a Well- Part 1

Its been awhile since my last post this spring. Lately work has kept me occupied, leaving me little free time to spend on improving and growing my homestead. Since my wife and I first moved into our temporary home last summer, we have been using water that either she or I truck in every few days and transfer into the two storage tanks within the trailer. From those two tanks, an on-demand water pump feeds it to the faucets and toilet as needed. We use this water only for cleaning and for any cooking and drinking we have a separate water container that resides in the fridge, keeping cold water always on hand.

Since I'm homesteading, it has become time to search for and find water on the property. I have come up with several promising spots to find water and determined how deep the water is using age old techniques of dowsing. I wont go into detail of this strange art since many don't believe in it, but I'm certain I will be putting a well in the right area, as long as I don't hit a rock. After finding the area, it is now time to get to the area, and since I am not a rich lad and hiring a well driller to come in is very expensive. I had one quote me $10,000 for the area I live in. This was a high shoot estimate he said and included not only the well drilling, but all material including permit fees, well testing, deep well pump, digging line to the house and a few other extras. He said of course it could come in far below that amount, but even then your still talking thousands. If your not able to drill, then one must fall back on the time honored method of pounding the well like the old farmers and homesteaders did back when they tamed this wild country.

A cousin of mine happened to have 2" well pipe on hand (schedule 80) and couplings. He sold this to me very cheap compared to what it would have cost to buy it from the hardware store. The extended family has on hand a pounder and pounding cap and pulleys and rope and other tools needed for this endeavor. I spent a Saturday collecting all of this stuff and assembling it for when I needed it. Some of the last items I needed to purchase was the 2" drive point and teflon plumbers paste that is used to seal the couplings. I had some tamarack poles that had once surrounded my Paintball speedball field, holding up wire and safety netting. I no longer use that field, so I took three of the poles to serve a new life as a tripod. I drilled and put a 1/2 inch rod through all three poles with large washers and nuts on each end when they were lying side by side and then lifted it up over the location of where I planned to pound the well. Once this was up in place, I then took some good rope and lashed the poles together for added strength. Once done, I took the large pulley and hung it from the top of the tripod and ran the large hay rope I had for connecting the the pounder weight. The pounder is a leaded weight that is slides over the top of the well pipe and slides up and down as you pull the rope and let it loose.

With everything in place, I am now ready to start pounding. Tractors are normally used for lifting the weight. For the first part though, I am only just starting the well point and making sure it is as plumb as I can get it. First thing I did after much internet research and talking to my many family memebers who have pounded wells before was to did a hold down about five feet with a post hole digger. This gave me an idea at least what type of soil I was starting with and also allowed for the point which is three feet long and the first length of pipe to sit a little bit in the earth and allowed me to get the pounder up and over onto it. For the first section of pounding was with just my own arms pulling on the rope. The pipe has been started and now I only am waiting for the weekend to come. My uncle with the tractor will be coming over and then the real pounding will start.

Wood Stove Part 4

After a whole winter of operation, now that the snow has melted and warmer weather has arrived I have taken the time to sheet the wood stove. Last fall when I began this project I scrounged sheets of used siding from wherever I could get it. With what I had stacked up, there was enough to sheet the stove. You will notice from the pictures that some of it is dirty. The plan is to get a little suds and water and wash it down. The only part that is not done are the corner pieces. They will have to wait a few weeks until my next payday. The corner pieces should make the stove look complete.

Spring has arrived!

Its been a long and very cold winter. I can say though that we made it thru the worst of it fairly intact. The trailer home stood up to the snow and blowing wind and with the wood stove and propane furnace we were able to keep warm. I can certainly say though that if I had not put in the wood stove last year, we would not have faired as well with only the propane furnace. These old homes only have three inch walls, barely any R-value. On days or evenings when I was unable to keep the stove running, the propane furnace ran fairly often and the heat was warm, but not toasty. With the wood stove running though, it was a continuous heat that was often cozy and relaxing. Only when the stronger winds were blowing from the north was it a little cool, but even then if the stove was up to temp, all was good.

The storage shed made it through the winter without any damage or problems. We had alot of snow and it stood up to the weight. I made a point of knocking any large amount off as soon as possible, but even by doing that it seemed capable of handling the weight. It not only stood up to the snow, it also stood up to several wind storms that blew through. The anchors that hold this to the ground stood up to the challenge. Overall, for just being a temporary storage building, I am very impressed with it and happy I bought it.

Now that spring is here, hopefully we will be moving forward with building our new home.

Winter's Grasp

Winter has been hitting us hard, over and over all winter. As you can see from the pictures there is no end in sight for at least a few more months. This is the type of snow I remember getting as a kid. For the most part we have been hanging low, keeping as warm as a person can in a tin box that has three inch walls. Actually though, the woodstove I built this fall has gone a long way towards keeping us more than warm. It works fantastically as long as a fire is kept in it. While I'm away at work it goes down to coals that I have to stoke up once I get home, but nothing to bad. I know that the stove has gone a long ways towards reducing the propane bill for this winter.

Speaking of stove, I unfortunately have not put the finishing touches on it yet. I had purchased the steel for the side, but I got as far as putting the plastic on the outside as a weatherproof for the insulation. Once it warms up one of these weekends (so far its been hoovering in the negative range for most of the winter) I will get it finished.

The Shed has been holding up real well in the weather. Everything in it is snug as a bug. The only drawback I have seen with this is that water condensation during the day builds up and can drip off onto whatever is inside. Luckily everything I have is in totes, so this is not an issue. You would not want to store anything in cardboard boxes of loose if there is a chance that water can wreck it.

With so much snow, I have been doing alot of snow removal on the driveway. Bouncing around on a bobcat with a snowblade on it can certainly mess your back up!

Besides removing snow from the road, another important area to be taken care of is the roof of the house itself. For the most part the roof on the trailer is flat with only a little bit of a pitch and so it is important to get all that weight off of it as soon as a large amount has accumulated. So is the cycle of winter!