We have water!

Jason Watson - well driller.

 

Perhaps the biggest variable in building a house in the country is the well.  Often, especially in the arid west, it's nothing more than a gamble.   You certainly can not predict how deep you'll need to go. Of course, the well drillers will make no guarantees if they'll even find water let alone whether they'll hit water with enough volume to operate a home.  Five gallons per minute (gpm) is considered an adequate supply to run a house.

Really, the only way to guess about potential for water is to determine what neighbors wells produce.  But in the kind of rough mountainous country where we are and with no really close neighbors, this is no more than a guess.  Two neighbors about a half a mile up the road who just dug wells got a bit less than 3 gpm from 250 ft to 300 ft deep wells.  This is not good since drilling (and linking the hole) costs $22 a foot and then there is the cost of the pump, wiring and a water line which runs about another $4000 - $5000. With less than 5 gpm you'll probably need a rather large water storage tank in the house.  On the other hand, a neighbor closer in the opposite direction on our road has a 180 ft. deep well that, I seem to recall, produces more than 20 gpm.

We chose to drill in the draw half way up the driveway.  Being so far from the house  means a longer trench, more wire and more water line is  needed and a pad for the drilling truck was required. Even though drilling farther away adds to cost, it just seemed so much more likely that we'd hit water there that up by the house we decided to do it.   There is a natural spring in the draw that was flowing until about a week ago. 

The drilling rig: well at about 110 feet deep.

 

They hit water at between 10 and 20 feet but this is too close to the surface for good quality water and that gets closed off by steel pipe. Between 40 ft. and 80 ft. they were in the granite and hit good water. They drilled to 160 ft. (minimum depth hole the driller will do for the $22/ft cost). The video below is at about 140 feet. Each foot of well holds 1 1/2 gallons of water and so, with water at 40 feet and a 160 foot deep well we can expect the well to hold about 180 gallons of water. In the end, the flow was very close to 5 1/2 gpm. Jason Watson, our well driller, was quite pleased and thought that drilling down from the house in the draw paid off.