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.
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.
