> Hell most of the licensed contractors I hire (electric, plumbing, etc) don’t bother to pull permits, even for new work.
Yeah, it’s your responsibility as a homeowner to get the permit (either get it yourself or see that the contractor does). Even if you don’t think the permit inspectors are doing anything in terms of quality control, the permit helps you to pass inspections as part of the sale process and will limit your insurance exposure if there’s ever an issue. There’s probably fine print in your insurance contract saying that all work shall be permitted as required.
If too many people start doing it, it becomes an issue of overdrawing groundwater. This leads to an arms race of digging ever deeper wells to reach the remaining groundwater, and on top of that starts leading to ground subsidence as ground formerly full of water dries out and compacts.
Off the top of my head, there is massive groundwater subsidence in the Central Valley of California, Mexico City, and Jakarta due to this issue, at rates measured in feet per year. This makes the land prone to flooding, and also damages buildings and infrastructure since the subsidence is generally not evenly spread out.
On property they “own”.
You’re literally asking the states permission to have the basic things needed for human survival- shelter, food, and water.
While this makes sense to me for a business or an organisation, it strikes me as unconscionable for a private individual to have to get permission from the state to survive.
One book that covers the history of water projects in the US is Cadillac Desert [0]. We have this cultural myth that all we need is a little more water to make the desert bloom. And as a country, we've wasted trillions of dollars diverting rivers for agricultural use. Agricultural users of water pay almost nothing for their water while using enormous amounts of taxpayer funding to do so. Utah and Arizona have recently had droughts where water consumption by private citizens was limited.
There are several crops that use enormous amounts of water, the one receiving attention is alfalfa. 82% of Utah's water is consumed by agriculture. The UT governor owns a farm that grows alfalfa for export. Instead of cutting back on his own farm's water consumption, he's been on radio & TV telling Utahns to pray for rain. Arizona has had some recent news stories about Saudi companies growing alfalfa in AZ and exporting the hay to Saudi Arabia. Alfalfa consumes so much water that growing it in Saudi Arabia is illegal. Amusingly, `alfalfa` is an Arabic word. The issue with AZ & UT is that there is plenty of taxpayer subsidized water to grow alfalfa for export while simultaneously rationing residential water consumption.
0 - https://www.amazon.com/Cadillac-Desert-American-Disappearing...
Ownership that is regulate and enforced by the state; if you own it according to the rules, you use it according to the rules. If you want to do something else, you can step outside the rules and best of luck to you.
It would be nice to be free of the state. But how do we deal with the Tragedy of the Commons? How do we make hidden externalities visible & accurately priced?
It seems like the population is too high in most places to be able to tolerate people doing their own thing, with their own property. Not sustainable unfortunately.
At this point, "private ownership" is fading away. Eventually, maybe a hundred of years from now, we'll all be leasing our land from the government, and perhaps even leasing our privileges.
But we also have a 13k liter cistern and with drip irrigation it holds reasonably long.
I’d actually be all in favor, except that the rate for non-agricultural users seems to be over 10x the rate for agricultural users.
Article (in Polish but there's pics): https://darmowyporadnik.pl/artykul/36/budownictwo/kopanie-st...
Edit: Or maybe I should say "it was" - most new wells are just a vertical steel pipe with a submerged electric pump rather than big concrete rings. These are obviously much more convenient and safer.
Well digging is still going strong - actually stronger, since people are now digging deeper wells as the water table is shrinking.
Don't risk it. Confined spaces are dangerous.
Would you suggest we stop digging basements?
There are far more issues with just walking outside, lightning strikes hitting people, are more common.
For each ring deeper, do you dig out under the bottom ring until it slides down and another can be added to the top of the stack? That sounds terrifying having a whole stack of concrete shifting around above you.
In historic well digging the walls needed to be secured with wooden planks or bricks and such after digging straight down. Huge risk of the walls falling in. This was a problem just generations ago... And all of the family had stories of grandfather's digging wells that collapsed and that the historic approach was dangerous.
With concrete rings, there is no danger of collapsing. And certainly, when placing a ring, noone should be standing inside!
But yes... - It becomes a little claustrophobic when this becomes deep. I stopped at 4.5m and got used to it by the time we came that deep. - I put a pipe in to blow fresh air to the bottom. This helps with the uneasy feeling of a possible bad smell - there is a risk of dropping a bucket on the head. Use a proper rope, a proper knot, a proper bucket made for lifting and stop when the guy above needs a break
When I was a kid I used to go to sleep listening to stories of my dad and his dad driving around on a 2 ton truck with a 3 ton drill and how the brakes always went out. Somehow they always lived to tell the tale.
Haven't thought about this in a long time. Good memories.
I do not recall whether the magical approach was any more successful than the traditional approach.
"I can't guarantee we'll hit water there" he said.
"I paying you. Just drill where I said" I said.
And of course we hit water.
I didn't stop to ask, but it wasn't a locate antenna (I am familiar with those, and he didn't have any wires or electronic equipment on him).
I was pretty surprised they were messing around with dowsing, knowing it's scientifically unproven/disproven.
Then again, people still use lie detectors and chiropractics.
if you are within 100 miles of a natural body of water, or in a flood plain, or anywhere that it rains semi-regularly, drilling will get you to a source of water.
there's no magic or divination involved.
That's not woo woo or some kind of super power. That's simply having the experience of having dug a deep hole in the ground a few times.
According to some sources I found:
- You need to request a permit from your city and your canton's water and sewage department
- To get a permit, you need a "proof of utility", so you can't just dig a well for fun, it needs to bring some benefit.
- You need a written technical planning document as well, including an analysis on the energy- and cost-efficiency of your project
- If you want to drill down to the groundwater (for drinking water quality), you need additional analyses being done, to prove that the project conforms to standards and causes no harm.
It sure sounds fun to have your own well, but I think I'll stick to collecting rain water.
Where homeowners become conflicted is that well gives them the rights to domestic use and to water a basic yard, but nothing beyond that. You are quickly in to "water rights" which can become complex and limiting. More and more we are seeing water masters (a state role) take away rights from landowners who are not fully using their water rights. For example, if the land was previously farmed but has now gone fallow and the water right has not been used, the state will revoke it - and there's a 0.0% chance of ever getting it back. This sometimes leads to cases where people (farmers) overuse their water to ensure they are demonstrating usage, but then of course that can lead to fines for overuse. No question water is going to be a defining issue in the American west for the foreseeable future.
I'm joking ofcourse, but not 100%
The proper comparison is looking at what it takes to do it for yourself or a friend. Of that list, that's probably just permit/inspection, which is hard to talk about generally because it's going to vary per locale. Although you really do want the backhoe.
[0] just spitballing an example, worker injury insurance could be provided more by the state from the general fund.
More specifically, around 1981 my Dad rented a drilling rig to supply the irrigation pump for our yard in Miami.
See, the city was phasing out septic systems, and had installed sewers to our neighborhood. They charged for sewer based on water consumed. By drilling a well he could avoid paying sewage fees for irrigation water.
I think he hit water at 8 feet, and put the well down to 12. This was Miami.
It also drilled through some limestone.
That's good advice for almost all tools. The average weekend warrior may never have been to their local tool rental shop, but it's worth checking out! You can rent just about anything, for very reasonable prices, and it tends to be pretty high quality/industrial stuff. For all the tools you only use one a year, it probably makes more financial sense to rent than buy.
When the water table is shallow, but deeper than your Louboutins - which is much of Florida - you can drill a well yourself, at low cost.
After all, the technique only works for down to about 20 feet (there's another page on how to extend that to 30 feet), and 7 of the 26 listed success stories are from Florida.
Bonus: it spurs you to think about conservation. When your 3-month wastewater averaging period starts, you know that any water you save will cut costs for the whole year.
There are hand operated drills, 150mm diameter with extension rods up to 10-15m long. If it works for your soil, then this is less messy.
I went with digging and a different type of dug well "Schachtbrunnen". I laid a pre-fabricated concrete ring on the ground and started digging inside until it sank into the ground. When it was level, I put the next ring on top. No special tool needed, a shovel, a bucket, some rope, patience and certainly a permit.
I went with an inner diameter of 1m, this is fine for a small shovel, a pump, a small jackhammer.
Concrete rings are used all the time in road construction work. I don't see a risk of collapse with those when stacking carefully. Even if one ring were to get a crack, where should it go? I felt safe in this regard
The thing to be aware of is that there's a few different kinds of additives you might need for well water.
The most usual is water softener. Ours isn't too hard, but what we do have is hydrogen sulphate from bacteria in the soil - it requires hydrogen peroxide to make the water smell neutral and palatable.
(1984) https://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/d...
> Some people ... got their rig stuck three different times in their first well! As they wrote, “We recognize that many of our problems are due to our inexperience …. But our inexperience is not much different from yours.”
They have many other articles on the subject; but I'm fond of linking to this one in particular.
I helped dig that well. And several others. The fellow in the middle of the picture there is my dad.
Using the gantry rig pictured in the article was much easier than just the engine unit (much like a post hole digger they sell in stores now). One of our crew was a gifted machinist who ran that up after we bent the several pipes trying to dig without bracing.
I honestly don’t think I’d have that level of determination unless I was truly desperate.
> It is great for saving money on watering your lawn and irrigating a garden.
Off topic: as a non native English speaker, the title made me pause. As in, why would I want to drill my water and do it well?… oh, water well, right.
You can sometimes work around this by installing filters (RO and otherwise), and UV lights. However you need lab results to tell you what filters to install, and you need to keep those filters maintained.
This particular method of drilling a well works in sandy soil or clay where the water table isn't very deep. If you're in mountains or on any topology with bedrock you'll need better equipment, particularly a carbide or diamond tipped bit. And you'll be drilling potentially hundreds of feet. Something like this would most certainly not work in Colorado, it would probably work in Florida or Louisiana.
https://waterfilterguru.com/is-it-legal-to-drill-your-own-we...
Shrinking aquifers and neighbors drilling wells just a bit deeper than their neighbor's wells have contributed to a long-standing conflict over water access, see Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner for the historical origins of conflicts.
"Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting!" - Mark Twain
You tapping in one of these wells means very little in the context of this important topic.
And collection at spring source from water bottling companies let's please not forget that environmental abuse.
Not all aquifers start underground.
My concern here is ground water will have septic contamination, don't know if that's stupid or not.
Hand dug wells are fun to watch on TikTok, most on the tag are old ones, but a few are people digging them - https://www.tiktok.com/tag/handdug%20well
This one scared the shit out of me - https://www.tiktok.com/@smithalayamrajeev/video/723999758509...
I was looking at this Polish Company selling augers, but I checked local bore records and they were 80m for the aquifer and they were hitting rock pretty quickly in their samples even if I went for ground water - https://www.ebay.com/str/drillpartnerofficialstore
It's not just that, dug and shallow wells are also getting surface water run-off -- basically anything on the ground in the immediate area or uphill. There's actually an acronym for this: GWUDI (Groundwater under the direct influence [of surface water]). They're highly susceptible to seasonal changes and rain. The worst ones are people that in a lower-lying area than nearby farms -- nitrates (from animal feces and fertilizers) and pesticides are all extremely expensive to remove from water.
When you do a drilled well, the annular space (the hole around the casing) actually has to be sealed (with bentonite) to prevent surface water from getting directly into the well and aquifer. I see no mention of this in the article.
Where I live (Ontario Canada) there are environmental laws protecting ground water. Badly done wells can actually contaminate a huge area and affect other people's wells and drinking water.
It isn't stupid concern for drinking water. You could have neighbours with septic tanks leaking, cesspools or using crazy amounts of roundup for their lawn.
But for watering flowers, washing and cleaning ground water is usually OK. You can always make a test of water quality at local authority...
Aquifier water is of good quality but getting to it might be expensive.
Note that I said most dirt above. There are types of soil that act more like pipes and so raw sewage from a leaking septic system has been found many miles away. Check with a local expert to see what soil you have to deal with.
I switched from using low-volume water sources to a 1.5HP well pump pulling from a swimming pool. The pool would empty in about 20 minutes, and I would then have to wait for it to refill from a regular hose. However, while this very high water volume was able to clear the pebbles (which is how I know the floor of the hole was covered with pebbles at all, it was maybe 12 feet down at that point), there was diminishing returns and eventually the pebbles no longer cleared the top.
I'm sure I was doing something completely wrong, in the end if you have sandy/silty/clay soil you can just buy a sand point (aka driven point) and sledgehammer it down as deep as you need to go. It's a lot more heavy labor but it is also almost certain to work.
Well point is NOT easy.
https://waterdata.usgs.gov/ca/nwis/current/?type=gw
Oddly a bunch of counties are missing from the results, despite USGS appearing to have some data.
The first step was to find the location and park the drilling rig so it wouldn't sink once the well was dug. Then you'd raise the drill arm, attach a section of pipe and the drill head. You'd lower it down into a round flange that had an opening to one side where all of the cuttings blew out. My job was to shovel the cuttings into a trench to direct water flow once you hit the water line. It was critical to keep water from getting under the tires of the rig.
Each section of pipe is 20 feet long and as you drill in you detach the rig head, raise it, get another section of pipe from a rotating carousel and then start grinding again. Once done you pull all the pipe by basically doing the reverse and then perform a similar operation to push casing down into the hole. When the rig pulls away you have a round hole in the ground ready to have another truck come in to insert an electric pump with all the wiring. Then you box everything up at the top and say job done.
Oil field drilling is pretty similar as well but the rigs are vastly larger and move way more earth much faster. My dad worked on a rough necking crew and I've been exposed to the oil and gas industry most of my life so this is an interesting tangent.
But, this lead me to think, is non rock ground frequent in urbanized area? Is rock ground like my place more like the exception? I'm used to it so I thought it was the norm, but I guess it is not.
There's a (university research group?) called WOT that uploads videos to Youtube with different low cost/low tech techniques, my favorite one being with a hand drill: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQRhsoSCXvg
this guy has me convinced that i can drill my own well.
i don't need to drill my own well, but if i ever do, i am sure that i can do it, now.
For one, you need to have an open mind, but be careful to not your brain fall off (https://youtu.be/RFO6ZhUW38w?si=1Snzh3lhFJ6d381g&t=12)
Then, we were very much interested in seeing these unusual things happening. As I mentioned it in a previous comment, I declared at the radio that I would immediately switch my PhD topic (in physics) to study them. Because, you know, Nobel prize. I did not get to see anything unusual, did a uneventful PhD and, well, do not have said Nobel prize.
But the important thing was: I wanted to measure. To have an experiment where what was unusual would be measurable. This means that tests with well diggers were a complete failure when they were asked to find water in controlled conditions.
OTOH, they were good when in the wild because (probably) they could read the landscape and see signs of water (conscientiously or not).
Same with homeopathy: when I have a headache I get an aspirin and before it had time to reach my stomach I feel better. I also once swam away from what I thought were sharks and I probably broke a swimming record because my arms were moving like a blender.
This is to say that scientists do not limi themselves - they just want to see and measure something to say that this is a thing. Unfortunately as soon as they do it the whole paranormal things fall apart. But we are still hoping.
