Well point and boreholes in CT

AchmatK

AchmatK

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Today is day 3 that I am without municipal water. I've been using condensate from my a/c that I have been collecting this past week but it' is not sufficient for our daily needs. Only getting on average 35l per day from the a/c. I also have a 1 000l hopper bin with rain water that I'm using for the cisterns. One toilet however has a Geberit wall mounted push button flush that cannot be filled manually.

My opposite neighbour has a well point and this morning I went to collect some water from him and to look at his setup.

The well was installed before they moved in and has been in use for probably more than 10 years. It has been connected directly to their home and supplies them with all their water needs. They have closed the municipal water supply. The well water is not filtered or treated in any way with little to no iron content. It is just over 2.5m deep.

It was built using concrete pipes dropped into the whole that was manually dug out. The concrete pipes are 1m in diameter and about 0.5m long and stacked on top of each other. The water level has dropped only a few times since they've been using it and when it does, they climb down the whole and dig it a bit deeper.

I've contacted a few people that does well points and they are extremely busy with a waiting time of 2 weeks and more. I will be doing something similar soon and will post updates on the progress.

Will post some pics of my neighbour's setup later.
 
I always wondered how many litres go to waste from aircon units, do you know what size your aircon is by any chance? :)
 
me too, how long do you keep your aircon on for this 35litre a day from aircon condensation?
 
Aircon size is 12 000 BTU. I posted some pics in another thread.

I work from home so my aircon runs 24hrs most days with the heat we currently have.
 
I'd be very careful piping water directly into the house without filtering it.
 
Here's the aircon water reclamation thread guys. I'm considering purchasing an aircon so I can start gathering the condensate. More cost-effective than the water from air machines and won't affect the environment negatively (in terms of noise and heat).
 
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xrapidx said:
I'd be very careful piping water directly into the house without filtering it.
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Like i mentioned, they have it piped directly and have been running it like this for more than 10 years. I also live about 500m from the Lourensford river so the water table is quite high.
 
signates said:
Like i mentioned, they have it piped directly and have been running it like this for more than 10 years. I also live about 500m from the Lourensford river so the water table is quite high.
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Either way - all you need is a sewerage pipe leak somewhere.
 
xrapidx said:
I'd be very careful piping water directly into the house without filtering it.
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There are a lot of well points / boreholes in my area. As far as I can see they send water for testing fairly regularly - seems to be labs that specialise in this. Mostly for mineral/iron content and e-coli.

It seems the majority can use it as potable water. The rest either have high iron or e-coli counts.
 
garp said:
There are a lot of well points / boreholes in my area. As far as I can see they send water for testing fairly regularly - seems to be labs that specialise in this. Mostly for mineral/iron content and e-coli.

It seems the majority can use it as potable water. The rest either have high iron or e-coli counts.
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Mine was tested to be clean 8 years ago - busy with piping it in to the house - testing it again, and even clean - it still won't go directly into the house unfiltered.
 
Update

Started digging the well yesterday. Finally got water this morning at a depth of 2m.

Going to go another 1m and then brick up the walls of the well.

Cannot seem to upload any pics.
 
My manager at work did the same thing, hit water at 5m depth. Apparently he has already extracted a few thousand liters.

You really don't need to go that deep to hit reasonable amounts of water.
 
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Some pics
 

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Damn - mine would have been sand - was thinking yours might be the same - was curious how you did the hole without it collapsing on its-self.
 
Gnome said:
Ofc, if you dig a hole on the top of a mountain I suspect it would be different.

Unless it is table mountain...

Hmm, this well thing is complicated.



Wow, you dug an actual well. Good work man!

The guy I know did this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGq0ETzZP0E

Waaay easier
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This method would not have worked as there is a layer of rocks and the water is underneath this layer.
 
Soil is very compact with a clay layer. It's going slow now as there are a lot of rocks that we have to get out. It's basically a river bed at the bottom of the well.
 
signates said:
Soil is very compact with a clay layer. It's going slow now as there are a lot of rocks that we have to get out. It's basically a river bed at the bottom of the well.
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My understanding is: Typically water is found once you hit rocks + clay layer, which traps water. You are lucky it is at such a low depth.

When they drill for a "borehole" (referred to as well in the US and UK), they drill until they hit the bedrock layer where water gets trapped.
 
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