Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Alaska Shallow water well

I have a lot of shallow wells on my place.

I use a screw in post hole digger that has a 1" thread steel pipe between the T handle and the auger bit. The auger bit looks like a coffee can with a slice in one side that shaves the dirt into it. When full pull it up and shake out the can. It pulls up a perfect plug of dirt. In Rock free dirt I can bore a hole 8 feet deep in 30-40 minutes comfortably. It will go as deep as you can turn the handle, and still pull up the plug of dirt. I think the deepest I have made is about 12 feet. Maybe a bit more. I had to use a ladder to get it out of the hole because the pipe was so long. The pipe also started to bend quite a bit.

Once the hole is done, my 8 foot holes are filled with water to about the 2 foot from the surface level. I drop in a 12V 500 gallon per hour bilge pump from a marine supply story. Then with a 4amp solar panel it will pump the water up from the hole into a storage tank. Bilge pumps don't have a lot of head pressure. So it cannot go much more then 6-7 feet deep unless you can use 120 VAC And get a Positive displacement pump down the hole or just a ordinary well pump.

It will pump water all day for free and fill an 800 gallon tank in a day or so. The pumps don't pump at rated flow when the head pressure gets to high( lifting the water that many feet up from the well reduces the volume.

So with about and hour of work, and a couple hundred bucks you can have all the water you want with this equipment. I irrigate my deer and turkey food plots with this exact system.