It’s been awhile, so I’m making up for lost time by writing a super long post!
Long ago, and far away (actually: 43 years ago and right here) a man dug a hole and struck water.
As far as I know, it’s the first and oldest well on Red Mountain. It has its quirks, enough that at times I feel like I should write them all down in case I get hit by a bus.
Dad drilled the well with an ancient driller (even ancient back then, and that was in the 70s) until he hit water at about 200 feet. That was the static water line, but he needed to go deeper to sink the pump. He hired a well-driller and somehow convinced him to drill in that same hole dad drilled, but to go deeper. Most well-drillers won’t do that. For good reason, as it turns out.
The well-driller went another 200 feet deeper. Dad installed the pump and 420 feet of 2″ steel pipe. Year: 1975. That is a hat on Dad’s head, not his hair.
Dad and I, 4/20/1975, the day we struck water.
Around 1999 my mother was having trouble getting enough or any water out of the well. She hired a “well guy” who determined she needed to replace the pump. He put in too large a pump, which drew down too much water and cavitated (sucked air), and burned out the pump in about a year.
My older and younger brothers took matters into their own hands and replaced the pump. It’s a dangerous job. They bolted a pulley system to the end of a telephone pole which they sunk 6 feet deep next to the well. They ran a cable through the pulley and attached one end to the front hitch on a truck and the other end to the water pipe. They pulled up the pipe 20 feet at a time.
The well pipe had several check valves through out, so the initial pull was 420 feet of 2″ steel pipe, full of water, plus the heavy electric cable that ran the length of the well, plus the pump on the end (which doesn’t weigh that much, but still).
My older brother (Ben) took a 6″ section of 2″ steel pipe with threads, attached a clevis fastener to it, and attached that to one end of the cable. My younger brother (Adam) screwed the steel pipe threads into the well pipe, then Ben backed the truck up 20 feet or so to lift the section of pipe out of the well. Adam slipped a pinch-plate under the coupling, Ben lowered the pipe to let it rest on that plate, and then Adam unscrewed the section of pipe and cut the tape holding the electric cable to the pipe. It’s a wet, tedious, and dangerous job. I was travelling and so didn’t participate.
Screw the pin into the end of the pipe, flag Ben to raise the pipe, slip the plate under the coupling, unscrew pipe, receive giant column of water in your boots, lay pipe down, repeat.
They did some well maintenance while they were there too, making a venturi-type device to sort of scour out the well.
Then they reversed the whole process, sinking a new pump back in the well.
And this is where it gets interesting, I suppose. The well has a dog-leg in it. Not an actual dog’s leg, but an abrupt little corner in it — not sharp but sharp enough that in order to get past it, you have to finagle the pipe and pump past it. The dog-leg is at about 200 feet. That’s also where Dad stopped drilling and the well-driller started. Coincidence? Nope, and probably one of the reasons drillers don’t like to go down an existing hole. Anyhoo, the best finagling we’ve used has been to twist the pipe at the top with a pipe-wrench until the pump clears the dog-leg. No biggie.
Around 2004 or 2005 we again had water failure. I had just moved into Mom’s house (she was in Portland). I called a well guy. He took about 30 seconds to glance at it and said that it’d be $5000. Apparently the tax for being a blonde female is 400%. I was pissed — I could tell that the pump was getting electricity and was running (he claimed the electrical had to be completely re-done and the pump wasn’t running). I knew the failure was either lack of water in the well or a pump issue (impellers damaged? intake screen clogged?). But the pump most definitely ran, you could feel the vibration in the pipe. Holding one end of a screw-driver to the pipe and one end to your ear, you could hear the pump running.
Fortunately, the telephone pole was still in place, with the pulley. Ben and I set aside a weekend to pull the pump and do the job ourselves.
If you ever go down a well, for any reason, plan on replacing everything you touch. You don’t want to just have to do it again in 6 months anyway.
We bought a pump and began the process: lift a section, pinch plate under coupling, cut tape holding electrical cable, unscrew pipe, repeat. It was February and cold of course. I had a pile of thick, heavy electrical cable on one side of me, and sticks of pipe on the other. We got to the last couple of sticks of pipe and were looking forward to being done for the day when I cut the tape holding the cable to the pipe in front of me. ZZIIIIIINNNNGGGGGG!!!!!! the cable started thrashing next to me and shooting back down the well. I ran for cover out of fear it’d wrap around my legs or arms or something and suck me into the well. It flopped and twirled and spun, the plastic casing of it curling and peeling away as it shot 400′ down the casing and finally stopped.
Shit.
The good news was, we then determined our pump issue was one of the pump not being screwed into the end of the pipe. The bad news was, the pump now sat at the bottom of the well, and the pipe we’d been lifting was not lifting the pump out of the well.
Ben to the rescue, again. He built a device like those chinese finger-cuffs you used to get in grade-school — remember those? He used a chunk of pipe and cut tabs in the end of it. He bent the top ends of the tabs inward. The pipe could slip over something, but if you pulled on that something, the tabs would catch it. The harder you pulled, the stronger the “pinch” of the tabs. Genius, right?
We dedicated a day to fishing the pump out of the well, holding little hope that we’d be successful.
We gathered our materials — the pump-puller device, 450′ of cable, and the truck. Ben drove the truck up the driveway until he’d pulled all the slack out of the cable, and I positioned the puller over the well. Then he drove back down to the well, lowering the device down.
Man, we hoped that thing would work. Otherwise, we were looking at drilling a new well. Maybe we could drop a pump in, but put it at 400 feet instead of 420, leaving the old pump at the bottom, but that didn’t sit well with us at all. And there was the matter of the electrical cable which was still attached to the pump.
We stood over the well, grabbed the cable, and gave it a gentle tug. Clunk. We looked at each other in disbelief.
“You think it caught?” I asked.
“It sure feels like it” he said.
“Guess we’ll pull it and find out.” Ben got back in the truck and slowly began pulling the cable back up. I pulled the electrical cable up and piled it to the side. We could barely contain our excitement.
I could see the pump when it got to about 10′ below me and I let out a screech.
“YEAH!!!! We got it!” I couldn’t believe our luck. Ben backed up the last few feet and I snatched the pump away from the top of the well before we could somehow lose it again. He let the pump down on the ground next to me and parked the truck.
“Ho… Leee.. Shit!” he said when he came down.
For fun, we stuck the pump in a trash can of water and powered it up. It shot a jet of water straight out the top, working perfectly. If it had stayed on the pipe, we’d have been in business. We determined that the finagling at the dog-leg, where you have to sort of screw the pump into the well, is where it came loosened, and then every time the pump fired up it loosened itself further until it came unscrewed.
Everything went back together easily, and we sunk a new pump down the well. The total process, including the dropped pump retrieval, took 2 days. Not bad for a couple of hacks.
In 2013 we began to have water trouble again and finally our water failed. Back down the well we went. This time, Ben had a boom truck that we used to pull the pump. We determined that the well was still good, but the pump and much of the pipe wasn’t. Trying to pay cash and having just started our business, we opted to replace the pump and we replaced part of the steel pipe with plastic. The next year we pulled the rest of the steel pipe and finished it all with plastic. I’m not sure how happy I am that we are getting so good at this.
Now, we have a new problem. Scale. It’s an old well. Wells are meant to be porous, which allows water to enter the well. But over time mineral scale clogs those pores and the intake screen on your pump. We have what is called “magnesium bacteria” and “iron bacteria”. We haven’t reached full water failure, but the time is close.
So, yesterday we used Sulfamic Acid pellets on the well. These were pretty easy, we just dumped them in the well and then you have to wait for 12 to 24 hours. It’s been 16 hours. We are hopeful.
If that doesn’t work, our next attempt will be Hydrogen Peroxide. Not the stuff you get at Walgreens, but 5 gallons of 35% food-grade H2O2. Dad’s had good luck with that in his well.
If that doesn’t work, then we’re again pulling everything and using dry ice. Apparently this is an old trick. I’ve heard a few things — that dropping the dry ice into a well produced carbonic acid and that’s what removes mineral deposits. But from what I’ve read, it doesn’t create THAT much carbonic acid. From the videos I’ve watched, it looks more like it’s a physical removal of scale via “rapid sublimation” — aka a big ol’ dry-ice bomb.
For your viewing pleasure… I love this, they have all of these warnings and whatnot and the guys doing it have zero protection. LOL! Could so easily be Jeff and Ben and I!
