Well, Well, Well

Today Allen and our friend, Casey, put in a new 40 ft. irrigation well. Our old one was dead and in Bosque Farms you can't use city water to irrigate, run sprinklers, etc. so we needed a new one to move forward with our landscaping plans. The estimate to have someone come out and put one in was $1700. Allen got to talking to our friends and they said we could do it ourselves. The cost: $700. They said, dig a hole, get some scaffolding, and start pounding with a sledge. They said they would get 1/8" of progress with each pound. That's a lot of pounding.

Another friend has a family business that rents large equipment. They have a pneumatic pounder and a compressor deal that will do the work for you. Casey came over and dug a 5 foot deep hole with the post hole digger while Allen got the stuff from Volvo rents. Our water table is 5'4" so it didn't take much to get where we needed to be. We threaded all of the pipes and went to work...

We've got water!

Threading the second length of pipe.

That, my friends, is how to drop a well!

So, I took video in the wrong orientation. I wanted to get everything in the picture. You can still see everything, but it's sideways, as I'm sure you've noticed. That was real time of how long it took us to pound the first 20 ft. pipe. We put in another 20ft. after that which took about twice as long so about 3 minutes. We were really glad we weren't out there with a sledge in our hands all day long.

After you sink the pipe, you have to blow out the sand and water that builds up during the process so you don't kill your pump. We put a compressor hose down in there and will let it blow out for about 8 hours. The first time you put some air down there, though, you get a little geyser of sand and water. (If you pause the music you can hear the stuff lots better on the video.)

Old Faithful? We hope so!