Working on our Water Well…

We spent the entire day Saturday working on our well.  We have a foreign matter of some sort floating in our water.  It’s clogging our exterior filter, our faucet heads, and decreasing the flow in our Berkey water filter so something had to be done.

Since our well was install a million years ago it had an actual metal pipe instead of a flexible plastic pipe to bring the water to the surface.  In order to pull our well and clean it out Randy had to open up a hole in our well house roof and borrow a bucket truck to pull the pipe out of the ground and through the roof.

See the little step stool so I could get my stubby self up on the back of the truck to help run the bucket.

You just can’t find good help with clothes around these parts!

Here comes the pipe.

It was pieced together in 25 foot sections, give or take.

Here is the first piece.

The second piece.

And finally, the third piece.

This was my job.  I was in charge of tilting the bucket which cannot be done in the bucket and has to be done by this lever on the back of the bucket truck.  See how it’s clearly marked…..I nearly dumped Randy out of it on a pratice run : )

The well was cleaned and the metal pipe was replaced with the flexible pipe.  However, now we are having issues with sand in our water and still small bits of tree root.  Getting well service people to come to your house takes and act of Congress in our neck of the woods, so we are patiently waiting for someone to come take a look.  We may have to dig a new well so we (and I use the term “we” here very loosely) are researching different solar wells and hand pumps.  We hope to use a solar well for our home and have another well dug with a hand pump installed east of our house for water livestock and some lone flowerbeds on that side of the property.

**Soapbox Warning.

More and more people are having trouble locating water here in Kansas.  Could it be the incredible number of irrigation systems dumping thousands of gallons of water a minute onto fields?  In the rain, in the blazing heat of the day, and on the windiest of days these systems run to bring water to crops better left to farmers in the North (corn, soybeans, etc.).  We are the breadbasket state and should maybe consider sticking to wheat which will grow just fine without the use of these systems.  How nice it would be to step outside and not here the roar of an irrigation system engine off in the distance.

I’ll share more details on our first step to taking our house off the grid if and when we get someone out to investigate the situation.  We have a feeling the well service company we may use is from an older generation and might frown upon our ideas to use solar and good ol’ fashioned elbow grease, but hopefully that is not the case.

Have a wonderful day!