Total Bust

So, we decided to drop another $200 on the equipment, get lots more pipe, hire some help, and go for it. Uh huh.

We've put another 20 feet of pipe in and nothing. We're in the middle of what feels like rock, but is probably clay. At 11:00 a.m., I went out to help Allen because our hired help had to leave. Some of the materials had been warped and the threads on the pipe ruined so things were not going our way. We decided to call it quits at 11:15 and made phone calls to buy new material. We tracked it all down and ran the errands.

After stopping by the Pioneer Day activities at the church and talking to our Bishop, who is a plumber, we found out we should have stopped 14 feet ago and tried the well. When you start to feel hard dirt or rock as you're pounding, you should stop because you're probably in a pocket of water before you go through the tough soil. Allen had mentioned doing that, but I had encouraged him to continue going deeper while we had the help. In order to test for the water, he would have had to clean up all of his gear and take it all apart, then blow out the pipe with the air hose. He couldn't get all the equipment back up by himself or run the jack alone, and I can't lift that stuff right now. My logic was: do everything you can with someone here who is useful. So, we pushed through. In the process, the cap that protects the pipe while we're pounding on it wasn't tight enough and it ruined the threads on both the pipe and the cap. So, the cap won't work for anymore pipe, and we can't put any more couplings on the ruined pipe to make the well any deeper. Not good. Since we discovered the problem with the pipe half way into the ground, we couldn't pull it out and use a new piece. So, we have pipe sticking about 5 feet up out of the ground, and can't thread anything onto it. The option is to cut the pipe, re-thread, and put a coupling on to make it usable to work with again. Having a tool that can do that vertically isn't easy to come by. Because our Bishop is a plumber, we thought he might have that tool.

After talking to him, we realize we've wasted the $200 on equipment and a whole weekend of time because we can't finish the well today. The ride home from the church (after this was all made clear to us) was a little tense. Allen felt pressured to do keep going even though he felt we should check the well after the first length of pipe which might have proven to be the sweet spot we'd been looking for all along. I felt frustrated because I always had a bad feeling about trying to do this job ourselves. I thought stubborn pride had played a huge part in the choice and now we are going to pay the price. So, we just kept quiet. We got home and put the hose down in the pipe to see what the situation was. Still, no water. Allen cleaned up and did yard work for the rest of the afternoon.

We've called in a professional who should be able to diagnosis the problem. Allen says we're going to pay him to make it go away. We thought we'd be saving $1000 by doing it ourselves and now will be paying for all of the rented equipment and for professional installation (to the tune of around $1500). We've also lost 2 weekends worth of time in the yard. Ugh!

We managed not to get into a finger pointing match and agreed that this was a total effort to save some money with zero experience. A real gamble. We both realized that after our last attempt, we should have called for help from pros and avoided the whole debacle today. We moped around all afternoon feeling sorry for ourselves and dumb to boot. I decided to make some cookies for the neighbors in an effort to serve someone else and quit feeling sorry for myself. Since chocolate heals all wounds, Allen is feeling a little better tonight too. However, WELL is now a 4 letter word in our house so please don't mention it again.

(Oh yeah, our garbage disposal upped and died earlier this week, too. Excuse me while I attend my own pity party.)