Well and water system

[Wolvenar]

 With all the talk about how hard pumping water offgrid is, I have been feeling particularly lucky to live where I do,
 it makes getting water easy.

As of 5/6/2012 this well has run on our offgrid system for 3 days, in poor solar conditions.
So far so good, but there has not been a lot of water demand either.

We have a standard Jetpump system with 2 inch stainless steel screen point.
Drinkable ( very good) water is only 28 feet down here, so pumping is very easy.
Water flow only depends on the size of pipe and pump your willing to put in.

When I repaired our water system years back I had to re-drive a point, well at least thats what I thought.
When my friend and I tried to drive (with an automated driver) a point in this white sugar sand it went about 8 feet and was stopped in its tracks, not by rocks, but the sand compacts instead of getting out of the road. I remembered then my grandpa used to go on about the troubles he had getting to water here. He said he had to auger down to the water before he could drive the point in.
So this is what I wound up doing (by hand).
The sad part is I had a 6 inch augered hole right to the water, yet because of finances we only put in a 2 inch point   

 My mother lives on the other side of our property now so we added a line to her instead of adding a new well.
So this little pump is easily supplying 2 homes.

Specs:
110v
~900w while on
28 feet to water from ground level
42 feet to bottom of point ( but not bottom of that water table)
~9 gpm max flow

 
Well pit ( grandfathered in no longer legal in Mn)


Many layers of insulation ( Minnesota ya know)


The open pit. the block walls were built in the 50's by my grandpa.
However this well spot has been here since well before the turn of the century. It was a open pit (wishing well) style well then
a point was put in and the majority of the hole filled with sand.
Yeah I know kinda messy piping, but I did what I had to work with back then


Close up, this pressure switch is just in case the one in the house fails and pressure gets to high.
Amazingly this pump can push well over 100psi.



Pic of the manifolds in the unfinished utility room

[ChrisOlson]

I've never considered pumping water that big of a deal for off-grid.  It's an intermittent load.  Our 240 volt Red Jacket 1.5 hp submersible pump is 165 feet down.  It only draws 7 amps.  You can run it with even a small 120 volt inverter with an autotransformer on it.
--
Chris

[rossw]

I've never considered pumping water that big of a deal for off-grid.  It's an intermittent load.  Our 240 volt Red Jacket 1.5 hp submersible pump is 165 feet down.  It only draws 7 amps.  You can run it with even a small 120 volt inverter with an autotransformer on it.

Not dissimilar to my situation, Chris.

I don't have a well... but I do live on (in) the very top of a hill.
We have a 105,000 litre tank right by the house, and another the same size further down the hill where it can (just) get "town water". I have a bore pump (designed for a 4" casing) in the bottom tank. It takes about 800 watts from my 240V AC supply. It pushes water 150' vertically and 400' horizontally up the hill to fill my "house" tank.

The old shurflow DC pump was a total waste of time and money.

Because we have so much water in the top tank, we can comfortably operate for 3-4 months without needing to run the pump - so it only operates when (a) the top tank is less than 75% full and (b) we have surplus power and (c) the system expects to have surplus power for at least 2 hours and (d) nothing else wants the power more!

This is a semi-automated system, and I'm working towards making it fully automatic with "best guessing".

[ChrisOlson]

Ross, some friends of ours that live off-grid about 30 miles north of us also have a cistern.  They fill it with the generator and a 240 volt deep well submersible pump.  Then feed the house with a DC ShurFlo pump.  It works great for them.

If you have heavy loads on your system, and not enough reserve capacity to handle the well pump if it starts, then it can be a challenge with a water and well system like ours.  That's why I used to have a separate inverter to run the well pump when we had our 12 volt system.  But since we've gone with the new 24 volt system it handles it with ease, and if the load exceeds what the inverters can do continuously they bring the genset online to help out until the load goes away.

I think it all depends on what sort of equipment you have because for very small off-grid systems a well pump can be a major load.  But if that's the case, the extra inverter just to run the pump always worked well for us too.
--
Chris

[A of J]

Wolv, while clearly your system works, I question how well.

Depending on your elevation above sea level, 28' is within reach of a centrifugal pump, a jet pump uses 25% of the consumed energy in re-circulating water down to the jet.

From your explanation you have saturated sands that yield adequate water that is not in a pressure layer, the universal problem with a "point", spear in my language (same beast) is the surrounding mesh can block, requiring pulling up and cleaning. With that you still need a foot valve that is below water level, a very problematic situation.

A professional driller (in my past life I used to be one) with a mud rotary rig would establish a water well in about 1 hour, you can DIY if that is your desire.

Allan
   

[Wolvenar]

I wondered if this was going to come up 

While it's not likely to be the most efficient, but it is the most reliable way I have experienced so far.

Anything I have done but this will lose prime, or just plain act up on a regular basis.

I have tried all sorts of different ways to do this.
Most are much more expensive to install, and I have had many more troubles with submerged pumps at other places than I have ever had with this setup. I have been told this is odd, but that's just what I have experienced I guess.

So far my worst problems were those valves down there cracking at the shutoffs  (Not because of freezing).
All were replaced with very heavy duty valves after the second time in a year I had to open the well.
Shoveling many feet of snow off the top at -30F or less is not fun.
 
So far that has never repeated itself.
 

[Wolvenar]

Oh, about the plugging.

The last point down there lasted near 30 years.
This sand is a fine sand, but its all very consistent in grain size, and not fine enough to easily plug the point.

Before we bought out my grandfathers estate my mother was living where she is, but this well was supplying her then.
It was getting very plugged, and also the water table had dropped so you can imagine the troubles.

She had a driller come out, charged her $400 something after pulling the point, then telling her he could not legally place a new point back on the end of the pipe and drive an extra 10'.. But *she* could legally do it.

It survived over the winter that way, that spring we acquired the land, and found the pipe running to what is now our house had broken, and likely caused her high power bills, and the well point failure.

Anyone think it's fun to dig 300' of water pipe to 15' deep? Most of it down the first 10' is nasty red clay 
I had it easy, only 14 hours on a backhoe and then a couple days on the tractor to fill back.
My grandpa did this all by hand .. but only to 9-10 foot.
You have to seriously admire how hard the generations before us would work to make life better for their families.
I have better images somewhere...
The actual trench is not in view in this image ( right behind the mound) but the clay is just like concrete because of the very dry summer.
A fair sized backhoe had a lot of troubles.
The walls of the trench are strait vertical and no worries of caving.


That shows about a quarter of the distance

[oztules]

Damn thats a decent trench