The new well is in and today was devoted to decommissioning the old well. The Missouri Department of Natural Resources has guidelines on this but the goal seems to be preventing contamination.

This involved pouring twenty bags of something called Envrioplug down the well. Moisture (and a little time) turns this into a hard clay-like substance that plugs the well until the end of time. After that it was Bobcat work, filling in the trench that held the pipes feeding water from the new well to a pressure tank in our basement…

…and tidying up the surrounding area.

I don’t recall being around when our old well was dug, almost 30 years ago. So I had no idea what the pump looked like until this morning. This is called a “submersible pump” and it seems pretty amazing something could work under wafter that long with very few problems. Lots of videos on this topic.

In the images below Joe Greene, one of our well guys, is wiring the pump to our electric. The red faucet is what Barb uses to water her flower beds in that part of the property.

The PVC pipe on the ground in the image below is what brings the water up and into the pressure tank in our basement. I counted 19 twenty-one foot sections which gets our pump down 400 feet.

We’re in the home stretch. The trench from the old well-head to the new one will hold the plumbing and electric. A Bobcat will be here next week to fill in the trench and tidy up.

The old well will be cut off below ground and filled with some kind of cement mixture as required by the Missouri Department of Natural Resources.

Day 1 – Day 2

After two (very hot days) of drilling, the crew hit water this afternoon. While I was imagining some big underground lake, the reality is water filling cracks and spaces down in the shale. When you drill down to where it is… you have water. Or something like that.

Mike says we have standing water at 315 feet. The drilled well is approximately 586 feet deep. That gets lined with steel casing (see image below) to a depth of about 443 feet. This keeps the rock from caving in, a problem we had with the old well.

Inside the steel casing is the PVC pipe that brings up the water. It goes down the full 586 feet. A pump is dropped down into the PVC, approximately 400 feet down. (My somewhat fuzzy grasp of what this looks like is shown in the diagram at the bottom of this post. Wikipedia has a lengthy and fascinating page on the history of wells.)

The rock that was removed in the drilling process will eventually wash down into the woods. A few more zinnias and you’ll never notice the well head. Image below is Mike and his crew cleaning up.

Update 8/4/22: B & H came back this morning with a fiber optic camera they dropped down the new well to make sure there were no problems with the PVC pipe. Ii watched for  a hundred feet or so but it was too much like seeing someone’s colonoscopy. A little goes a long way. We’re good to go. Next step is to drop the (very expensive) pump down about 400 feet and hook the new well into our existing pipes.

Day 1 – Day 3

Mike and his crew from B & H Well Drilling rolled up in three big trucks at nine this morning and worked like Hebrew slaves all day. (I don’t think they stopped for lunch)

The big drilling truck is a monster. This one was purchased sometime around 2007 at a cost of around $400,000. A new one today would run you about a million bucks.

When complete, the well will be something over 600 feet, although the steel casing and pump won’t be down that far. I’m fuzzy on this point but the water table is somewhere around 200 feet and the pump will be below that and can be lowered further if necessary.

The hole they spent all day drilling will be lined with a steel casing. These are 21 feet long and before each one is lowered, it has to be welded to the previous pipe. A tedious process, indeed. And everything that goes into this well –steel casing, PVC pipe, the pump, wiring… everything, has dramatically increased in prices-per-foot.

The crew will return tomorrow and — barring any problems– should finish drilling. Once the pump is in and working all of this has to be fed into our plumbing. Stay tuned.

Day 2 – Day 3

When we built our home (30+ years ago) we had to drill a well for water. It’s never been a problem, until this week.

We started getting air in our pipes and called Joe Green (the man who did has maintained our well all these years. While pulling the pump, it got stuck. Wouldn’t come up, wouldn’t go down. Big problem. Nothing to do but cut the pipe drill a new well. And, yes, it will be insanely expensive. The company that drilled our well all those years ago will come out next week to drill a new one.

While browsing their website I learned that each person in your household will use an average of 65-95 gallons per day. 

As part of their service, they provide us with a big tank of water that can be used for just about everything except drinking and cooking. They feed the water directly into our plumbing so we can shower, flush, wash our hands, etc. Big improvement over buckets and jugs of water everywhere. It will be a while before I take water for granted.

I’m told the drilling trucks are the size of firetrucks. Big. I’ll post photos and videos here next week.