Spring forward, "lose" an hour...and wake up with no water, too. And now...

[Bruce Wrenn]

The well was apparently "drilled" by the old impact method back in the day, rather than bored like more contemporary holes in the ground.

Jim, I'm going on 72, so you aren't too old. Percussion cable tool was most likely how you well was drilled. New wells are drilled also using percussion, but it's furnished by a DTH (Down The Hole Hammer.) Think of a jack hammer suspended by a long string of rotating pipe.

[Brian Tymchak]

Same goes with water heaters.

... and sump pumps....

[Jim Becker]

... and sump pumps....

The original impetus for getting the whole house generator after a sump pump failure flooded the basement during a Hurricane in 2011...and I keep an extra one (older, but still works) for emergency use, too.

[Lee Schierer]

I'm beyond doing work like that, don't have the tools/machinery and we were also under the impression that this well was much deeper than it actually was. (thankfully) The pros actually had trouble pulling it up and they do it several times a day. Whomever installed the old one had it encased in a slitted PVC wrapper which was getting caught on debris as they raised it. The well was apparently "drilled" by the old impact method back in the day, rather than bored like more contemporary holes in the ground.

My well was drilled by the impact method and is 26 feet deep, the well casing goes all the way down and is slotted at the bottom to let water in. My 1/2 Hp Gould Pump was stainless and bronze, though the pump vane stack was plastic. The stack was about 2" shorter than new, the upper guide bearing was gone and the stainless steel shaft had been reduced in sized about 1/8" in diameter. My pump ran the house water and heat system water at 10+ gpm during the heat season for 2` years. It pumped somewhere more than 1.1 million gallons of water during that time. I'm sue I got my money's worth. The new pump should last a lot longer as it no longer services the heat system. We use so little water now that the heat system isn't using the well as a heat source that the well has become artesian.

[Tom M King]

Here, drilled wells are 8 to 6" diameter in granite, and bored wells are 30" diameter in dirt. Bored wells have casing all the way down to hold the dirt back, and drilled wells just have casing down to to top of the granite. The drilling rigs have giant air compressors, and water pumps. Water is pumped down, and air blows it all back out to keep the hole clean. The drilling rig is a million dollar hammer drill.

Bored wells here are usually less than 40 feet deep. Drilled wells can go from around 100 to 600 feet deep. They go down until they hit a good supply of water. Our well is 220 feet deep, and the submersible pump has 160' of 1" PVC above it. Without anything in the well, it sounds like a river running down there.

[Jim Becker]

I guess I used the word "bored" when I meant "drilled" in your context, Tom. Typical wells here are 100-400'. This one happens to be 60' with water at 24'. I thought it was much deeper based on a perceived conversation with the previous owners years ago, but clearly I either misunderstood or misheard or was misled. The casing doesn't go all the way however, according to the well pump dudes that were here entertaining me for my weekend emergency...

Lee, the pump they pulled out was stainless steel and generally "looked" pristine under the layer of gunk once it was removed from the slitted PVC shroud. It was just completely burned out. But again...29 years is a pretty long haul for these things I'm led to believe. When/if we eventually move/downsize, I'll not have to worry about the well pump for sure 'cause that's not a long, long way out at this point..

[Tom M King]

Yeah, you got your money's worth out of that one. We had one to almost last 20 years, but the second one only lasted about 15.

[Dan Hall]

Around these parts wells are either too deep to discuss or you punch a hole 20' deep in the back yard and you have to put a plug in it to keep the water from flooding the area. Artesian wells they call them. Like most parts of the country though as more and more folks find a life here, reserves of water dwindle. We are blessed in good years with a plentiful snow pack on the Sierra Nevada. While most of that drains toward the Pacific a fair amount makes it our way by natural aquifer..

[Tom M King]

Here, there is no such thing as a shortage of water. It runs out of the ground every few hundred yards as springs, and over the eons, those have eroded out to be feeder branches, and creeks, that flow into the river. A lot of people have bored wells where there is a thick enough layer of clay over the granite, but the closer to the river you get, the thinner the soil gets, so usually the granite is too close to the top of the ground to have anything but a drilled well.

Our lake is held back by one of several hydroelectric dams on the Roanoke River. So our electricity comes from this water running downhill. The shoreline of the lake is so jagged because of all these feeders, that the lake has over 350 miles of shoreline, while only being 35 miles long.

A half mile from our house, we have an abandoned rock quarry that has .8 acre of 22 foot deep water in it. Story goes that the rock quarry hit a spring that flowed so much water that they couldn't pump it out. I assume all the drilled wells around here tie into that same aquifer. Google Earth shows that the level of the rock quarry is just a little above the level in the lake, so it might all be tied together some way.