How to drill A Cheap Water Well
DIY Water Well Drilling - 6 Ways To Drill Your Own Well in 2018
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If you're watching this video you probably want to drill your own water well,
and I'm going to briefly summarize the six main ways you can do that.
There's a lot of confusion. It's hard to figure out exactly
what you're doing when you first start out in this.
I work in the well drilling industry, so it's very easy for me to summarize
exactly what you need.
So your options are like this. They've been drilling wells by hand for
thousands of years.
You take a shovel. You go out and you dig a hole in the ground about three foot around
and you keep going until your feet touch water.
This is a lot of work as you may imagine; it's also kind of dangerous because the
walls can collapse on you, and it's limited by the fact that the deeper you go,
the father it is to pull that dirt back out of the well and the more dangerous
and more risk of cave in there is,
so if you have to go more than about 20 or 30 feet
it's really not a great option. You can do deeper than that,
but it's not recommended by pretty much anybody.
Next you have what's called a well point. Now you can drive a spike about a 4 foot
long, 2 inch diameter spike in the ground.
You just keep adding length of pipe to the top of it, and you just put a hammer
and you go bang and bang and bang
until that pipe disappears. Again you keep doing this until you can suck out water.
This is also limited by the fact that you only can go about 25 feet or so before
it won't work anymore.
This is because you have to suck the water out of the hole, which means the
type of pump that you're able to use will not really
be able to pull water deeper than that.
You need a shallow well pump for this, and they're
limited to about 25 or 30 feet at most. So this is also a lot of work.
I mean you're taking a sledgehammer and you're going bang several thousand times to
get this down there, and sometimes it doesn't ever work,
and sometimes there's no water down there.
So this is an ok system, and it's fairly cheap, but it's a lot of effort and
there's no guarantee of success.
The other option that you can use is called jetting, and this is where you take
a water hose and hook it up to a length of pipe, usually two-inch pipe. And you just kind of hit
like this and just kind of push it into the ground, and gradually the water blows the sand
back away and you just keep going deeper.
You can rotate and put some little teeth on the end,
and you can just keep going deeper and deeper and deeper.
This is also limited by the fact that you can only go about 30 or 40 feet
before you start getting real problems with getting the water out
and pulling up the mud out of the well.
Also the major limitation with this is, obviously, it's blowing out sand.
It doesn't blow out rock, and it really doesn't blow out clay all that well.
So unless you have a very easy well and a
very shallow well you need to dig,
maybe 20 30 feet, none of these first three options are really all that practical.
Now, you can do them, and they are fairly cheap, although they are
usually labor-intensive, but if these options won't work for you, then you have
to start at the other end, and so we'll start the other end and we're going to work our way back down
from the most expensive and back our way down. So on the other end, you have hiring a professional.
You go to the yellow pages, you dial up somebody and say "come drill me a well",
and they usually charge between 10 and 40 dollars per foot. And they usually
won't even talk to you if you don't go at least a hundred foot deep, and they
like to go 300 or 400, or 600 feet deep.
So you're looking at between 4 and 15 thousand dollars to have a professional drill your well.
That's about a typical price, and your average range is going to be about 6 or 7.
This may or may not include the pump afterwards. So this is a big chunk of
money, but there's very little headache involved. You pick up the phone you say
"Come drill my well", you write them a check,
they're gone, it's done. Now I hear horror stories every day from people who have
professional well-drillers drill them wells and either overcharge them, they go
deeper than they really needed to,
they don't case it right and the well caves in later, but by and large, if you
pay someone to drill you a well, you're likely to get a decent water source and
not have to think about it too much. If you want to do it yourself
the most powerful method you can use is probably the Deep Rock or the Hydro-Drill
system. They're basically the same thing, just different brands.
What that is it's a derrick that sets about here, it's about this big around, and it has
a big motor on top that twists the drill stem. On the bottom of that drill stem you're
going to have a bit, fairly complicated depending on what kind of bit you get,
and you're going to have a big pump that pushes water down through the pipe and blows
water out the bottom and up around to get your tailings out.
This requires a large settling pond, something on the order of about, you know,
20 or 30 feet in diameter, with a big piece of plastic laid down in it.
It takes a lot of area, it's quite a bit of a mess, it's a lot of work, and again I work
in the well drilling industry. I hear a lot of horror stories but what happens
with this because you're dealing with a metal drill stem. That drill stem drops a
hundred feet in the ground, 200 feet in the ground.
You're looking at having a couple hundred pounds of pipe in the ground
which means that, there's a winch attached to the system, yes, but if you slip, if
the winch doesn't quite grab right,
all of a sudden your well stem drops when you're trying to pull the well out,
and it's down 50 feet in the ground. How are you going to pull it out?
A lot of times you never do get it out.
So there's problems with this system as well. Also you're looking at between, the
absolute minimum you're going to be paying for a system like this is about 3 grand and up to
about five or six depending on how hard a dirt you expect to drill through. And so
we're back in the range of just paying someone to come do it for you and not
having any headache.
So this has been around for about 50 years. It does work.
The main advantage is that people can use it over and over again.
So if you need a bunch of wells, or you and your neighbor both need wells or whatever,
it's a decent system. Don't get me wrong, it does work, but it's expensive, and it
is a lot of work. It's very heavy.
So in the well drilling industry there's a big gap between the 20 or 30 foot wells that
don't cost you very much but are really labor-intensive and the four or five
thousand dollar wells that do cost a lot but do get the job done.
So there's that big gap there, and that's where I come in. This is what we do for a living.
So this is our well drill. Now this is an air-powered motor, which means that
you hook up this air hose to a large compressor and this to a piece of PVC pipe.
This air hose comes down here and it spins this bit like so, and then the
exhaust from the motor goes up the pipe and that creates a suction
so that water that's in the hole is blown back up and out the top. So it's the
opposite of the Hydro Drill in that it blows water down and lets it float out.
We blow our water down the outside and let it come back up by the power of the air.
I drilled a well with this drill last year to 175 feet deep, and I did it in 25 hours.
That's a little bit above average to be honest. That's actually a pretty good time.
I've been doing this for a long time. But we drilled through sand and a fair amount of clay, a little bit of rock.
This drill will drill rock. Now, I'm not going to pretend that
it's as good as a hundred-thousand-dollar machine.
That's obviously not, but it will drill through it. I've had customers who drill through
solid granite, but it's extremely slow. In those kinds of hard rocks you're looking at
half an inch, maybe an inch, two inches an hour max. But if you're drilling in clay,
you can get between three inches and three feet an hour. Drilling in sand you can get
between 5 and 25 feet an hour.
Like I said I drilled a 175 feet in 25 hours, and a lot
of that was sand, and I did it in an average of about 25 feet per hour.
One of the main advantages of this drill is that you can pull this drill out
check the bit, sharpen it, put it back down the well all in less than five minutes.
No other drill on the market can do that because if you pull out the Hydro Drill, you got
to crank it up, tighten it down, loosen it out,
crank it up, tighten it down, and winch it up. And you're spending 2-3 hours just pulling the drill.
So if you have a problem: the well starts to cave in, something goes weird down there,
and need to get the drill out of the well in a hurry,
all you have to do just start pulling it out. The pipe is flexible so you can just
have someone walking over the hill with it;
you just keep pulling it out hand over hand, and you're out of the well in 30-40 seconds.
So it's very flexible. The whole drill here with the bit and everything weighs
less than 10 pounds so you can pack it in some place where you can't get
anywhere else. You can do it behind a house in a residential area. You can go a lot of
places that you could not get a real well drill or a professional rig in there.
So it's extremely portable, extremely lightweight. The only thing it really requires is
a large air compressor. You have to be able to put out at least 16 CFM at 90 PSI, and that's
usually about a seven or eight horsepower compressor or more because
that's the power source, that's what turns this. The more power you have,
the better it's going to work. If you start dropping below that, your drill is not goingto run as well.
So this system I've used to drill 210 feet deep.
You can drill through solid rock, but it's going to take a lot of time. If you have
to do a lot of solid rock, to be honest, I would recommend you just go to Hydro Drill
or Deep Rock or just get a professional to do it. This can be extremely tedious,
but if you're doing anything else,
sand, clay, a little bit of rock, then I think this drill is the best option on the market.
Now obviously I sell this drill, so I'm a little bit biased,
and you really can't trust me.
But do the research. What I've listed for you here today are the main options,
and they are the main strengths and weaknesses of each system.
Look into them. See what it costs to do it in your area, see what you really need to do, and I think
you'll find that this drill is the best value out there.
I did because that's how I got started with this in the first place.
I didn't wake up one morning and say, "I want to sell well drills for a living".
I woke up, and I said "I need a well". And so we looked around; I did the research --
the stuff that I just summarized for you --
I did all that, and I found that there was just nothing in my price range that would do the job I needed.
We couldn't just go 20-30 feet. We had to go deeper, and I couldn't afford to pay $5,000 for a well,
so we spent the better part of 2 years developing this drill
and making it so it would drill through all these kinds of soils and designing
ways for the water to come up here and the air to come up here and everything to go
like it does, and then other people wanted to buy it.
So we started selling these, and that's what led me to where I am today.
So visit our website, and let me know if you have any questions,
and maybe by this time next year,
you'll be drinking water out of a well that you drilled yourself!
