Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Well point clean out

Generally you might start finding decent water at 300 to 400 feet.

It will be soda water.....may or not be sour though. You can drink it....but it tastes like schit.


The water at 800 to 1200 used to be a bit better.

Now its pretty sour.


Lots of cisterns and 5 gallon jugs of water.

There is a community spring where you can fill your jug too.

It runs slow though...gallon or so a minute.

800 - 1200, wow those gotta be spendy holes.

I damn near buy all the water I drink and cook with anymore and I have good tab water.
A few community filler up locations around the Flathead as well, some run pretty good.

Do you have some major irrigation wells?

I worked with a few 8 and 10 inch wells in Alaska, but mostly less that 300ft. deep.
30, 40 and 60hp 3 phase submersible pumps, 300 to 500 gpm
.
Always curious of what they irrigated large areas with for agriculture use when they have to have wells to do it.
Some of the irrigation systems I've seen along the roads in my travels must require a huge volume to feed.

I know there can be ugly well water but in TX every well we have trumps every last bit of commercial water I've tasted. And then they add this and that to make it "legal" water

I'd just as soon have well water forever.

The 800 and deeper wells are generally artesian wells. With the lower gas pressure now, a lot of those were abandoned, or set up with submersibles.

The area to the north of us has a shallow aquifer that they irrigate out of.

I believe most of the wells are less than 100 feet deep.


The water levels have been dropping steadily.


I live in a pretty crappy area for water. A dude with a willow branch has just as good a chance of finding water as a Geologist.

I had to learn by the seat of my pants how to deal with removing and installing the larger submersibles.
Most remote Alaska locations don't have a well guy and a truck for doing well guy stuff, it's all DIY.

Just pulling 300 feet of 3 inch sch 40 steel pipe with a 60 hp 7 stage pump screwed to it can be a challenge, I can just imagine what a 800/1200 footer could weigh and of course with a working foot valve the bit ch is always full of water.

Had to figure out how to retrieve one that was dropped down a hole once too, that's always fun....

Post up the test results when you get them.

And any pH results from the different samples

Interesting thread and informative too. My in laws had their well in Eastern Washington drilled deeper a few years ago. They went down to 750’ but I believe they only cased it to 600’. It’s good water but not as good as our well water here on the island. I’d think that any water (well) that was more than a few hundred feet deep would be good water but I’m always learning something from you guys.

Why would a deep well be sour? What causes that? Sorry if it’s a stupid question.....

Hydrogen sulfide causes our sour water.

Haha!

You learned how to fish eh?

Probably because I am weird......I like to log onto the State Bureau of Mines site and look up all the old well logs.


Most of them are "classified".....petroleum wells that only get unsealed when they are abandoned.


Lots of water wells too. You can overlay the fault lines and formations on the site as well.



Anyway.....sometimes the well logs are a bit funny.

One I found the other day was two black dots side by side.

The second dot claimed a dept of three thousand some odd feet. A "petwell". No doubt the Sawtooth formation.

The first black dot claimed the depth was "to the top of the tool"........


The boys lost the tool down hole and could not fish it out.

Moved over a few feet and went to drilling.




I guess you had to be there......but it made me laugh out loud. If its not one thing its two things.......

Oh yeah...

I will, dropping them off here in a little bit and I think they said it takes about 36 hours to get results back. Also, after priming the pump the water flow looked to be a bit better so I did another makeshift flow test. The last one took about 1:10 to fill a 5 gallon bucket, this time it took :55 seconds so it got a little bit better since last weekend. Ran it about an hour and 15 minutes and filled the test bottles and there was so silt in any of them.

What tests are being run?

Got 2 of the 3 results back, water tested unsatisfactory for total coliform and 1.1 ppm for nitrates which is well below the 10ppm allowable limit, still waiting for the arsenic results to come in. No e-coli detected which is a huge relief. Going to try and shock the well and see if we can clear up the coliform bacteria next time I head out to the cabin.

Be sure and sanitize everything around where you take the samples, no screen filters on a spigot or hose, etc.
Samples can easily be contaminated while being drawn or just in the act of screwing the lid on the test bottle..

If you already have some pipe/distribution in place, shock it too. Start clean. Good Luck!

Well tested negative for arsenic so other than the total coliform issue the water isn't contaminated with anything else. When I get back from our trip back east i'm going to do a proper well shock, let the bleach sit in the well/pipe/pump for about a week then retry. If that doesn't fix it then it has to be a water issue.

That's cool, sound like you are gaining ground....

Driven well, not drilled.

Might get some pool shock treatment.