So, my buddy has a cabin/ shack in the woods. A pretty cool place. No water. No electricity. No cell or internet signals. Completely off the grid. He wants to build a house and remain off the grid. I have been up there many times and bringing your own water (5 gal Poland Springs jugs) is loosing its appeal fast. Filling compound buckets from the stream is also a PITA and it’s not potable.
One of the locals came by last week and said we should dig a hole and bury a huge water tank (that has holes) which will fill up with ground water. Tadaa! I termed it surface water and he said “No, ground water. The (his) cows have been drinking it for years and they are still alive so that’s what I (he) have been doing.”
I say ground water is water from recent rains which seeped into the ground and reached its saturation limit thereby creating a water table.
However, wells are actually aquifers which have been tapped. According to what I recall from the Learning or Discovery Channels, it takes water about 40,000 years to filter into the aquifer. Therefore, when a well runs dry, lots of rain isn’t going to help for quite some time.
Well diggers in the area say they’ll need to drill about 350″ to find an aquifer/ well. Locals say “That’s because they charge by the foot.” We are told, often, to dig a deep hole and stick a huge plastic bucket available at a buddy’s farm, feed supply, or odds and ends store. “You’ll have water even before you stop digging.” I say that’s surface water and even though there have not been chemicals applied to these areas for 50 – 60 years if even ever, there’s still the chance of unfriendly bacteria getting into the water.
Nearby stream might have at one time been potable, but a neighbor has created a pond upstream and the run-off now feeds/ creates the stream. This water, downstream of the pond, definitely isn’t potable. Went to take a shower in the runoff “waterfall” and it smelled – bad.
Any thoughts?
Frankie
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ME NO DRINKEE THAT WATER!!!
I've put in a new well system at work. I'm an engineer, but not specially trained in wells. I learned a few things from the consulting engineer and the state inspector, though.
Surface water is not desirable, and for the workplace, not permissible. There are lots of contaminants that could be in surface water, not only the bacteria you might expect, but also a parasite called Giardia. Testing for Giardia is expensive and can take months, so is rarely done. It's also not vulnerable to chlorination at the levels that can be used in drinking water and so great care is taken to keep it out of public water supplies in the first place.
Taking water from a pit in the ground that you dug (which is essentially what you'd be doing) does not provide an environment that ensures surface water could not contaminate the supply.
Most streams are fine, of course. But if there were Giardia in the surface water your pit technique would not guarantee its safety.
....thought your location was Walla Walla............
you can always build a cistern to capture rain water/snow melt if you have enough.............where is this "woods"?
as for a well, well.....fork over the $ and be done with it......or keep lugging and complaining.........once a well is in you can power it with solar to augment a small generator (which you'll have to lug fuel to).......you're gonna' be carrying something somewhere from the sounds of it.
I'm not flippin' you off.........just counting cubits
didnt junkhound or somebody here build a drill rig.
tried a search and came up nada
I'm not flippin' you off.........just counting cubits
Yep, sure did, lotsa fun, probably took me 3-500 hours, lost track. Could have paid to have one drilled for lots less hours at day job on OT or sum such. Building the rig was a learning experience.
Think the original thread has details of DW and I hand digging our first well, with some discussion of ground water, etc. I updated the original thread, 'well drilling adventures'
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Edited 5/27/2009 10:43 pm ET by junkhound
When I caught Giardia, it tore the hell out of my guts. I never want to experience that again.
Be very very cautious Frankie. I would not go near water that may be contaminated by surface run-off. A small town in western Ontario had its deep wells contaminated by run-off from farms and at least six people died from drinking the water.
The "right" answer would, of course, take someone that had some specific knowledge of your area. However, around here there are still two types of wells in common use. The drilled wells, down to the aquifer, are several hundred feet deep, but much shallower hand dug or "bored" wells are also still in use. The bored & hand dug wells are large diameter, around 30", and count on the well hole being large enough to serve as a reservoir for water that usually seeps in slowly. They, of course, still need to be sealed to prevent ground water for contaminating the ground water that seeps into the well.
In some places that ground water is not very deep at all. I certainly wouldn't use it without having it thoroughly tested.
In sandy soils with high water tables people use a well-point that can be driven in my hand.
It would be ground water, but with a surface water influence. As such it is not generally considered potable. Generally, if water travels several hundred feet through nonorganic soils, it starts to become microbe free. Similar to the effect of a septic leach field but in reverse.
I have developed several spring water sources for potable water systems. Typically, they end up with clay caps over the spring box, and for a hundred feet or so, to eliminate direct infiltration of the surface water, and increase the percolation distance.
There are demand run UV sterilization units that can run on energy generated by a solar panel. They would kill the tiny life forms, but not giardia. However, a microporous filter will pull out giardia, and the other eggs, cysts, etc.
There is nothing low energy, that I know of, that will get any fertilizer residues, etc., out of the water.
My suggested first step would to dig the six foot hole, with a post hole auger, and then get a sample of water for a chemical and mineral analysis, to see what you are up against.
Frankie,
Dig the hole deep. Maybe three times the height of a barrel. And about twice the width of a barrel.
Use a plastic 55 gallon barrel.
Leave the bottom half of the barrel solid, drill a kazillion holes in the top half.
Wrap the barrel in two layers of landscape fabric.
Put about a foot of gravel in the bottom of the hole.
Put the barrel on top of that.
Fill the hole with gravel, up to about a foot off of the surface.
Cover the rest with clay.
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Or, just drive a well point.
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Either way, set it up with a hand pump, when finished.
If you want to drink the water, distill it.
Once you have farted around enough with the water distillery, you'll have enough experience to consider building a new one, to distill some corn. Then you won't care about that girardia stuff anymore...