Just what is the exact terminology that should be used, btw?
When I was a kid in Norway we had both a ‘well’ and a ‘borehole’. The first was a stone-lined square pit a metre and a half deep with water seeping into it from the soil and which was basically a historical curiosity. The latter was a forty-metre deep pipe drilled into solid granite, witha pump at the bottom and the top of the bore-pipe (along with the exiting water-pipe) situated in a small concrete chamber covered with a big concrete lid, a layer of sand, and some paving slabs. It provided all the water we used but I would never even have know it existed apart from The Great Pump Replacement Project that happened one summer.
It seems in the US ‘well’ covers both type of systems, which I suppose makes sense since they are the same in principle, even if they are quite different in implementation.
For an anachronistic answer, my country estate has two hand-dug wells. They are about five feet in diameter and about 20-25 feet deep. The sides are lined with brick, which extends up about three feet above ground level. There’s a hinged wooden lid (that I need to replace) for a cover to keep the varmits out. The water is extracted using a bucket, pulley, and a rope. I don’t know how deep the water is in them; I’ve never dropped a bucket all the way down.
The well closest to the house has terrific water. My grandmother directed its digging by my father and his brothers when they were teenagers. That would have been in the early 1950s.
I’ve gotten used to the system, enough so that I don’t care to install an electric pump and tank and have to deal with the maintenance. I have several buckets that I keep full of water for various uses.
I want to know specifically about Hollie Hobby-type wells.
You know the type (second image)–a stone circle, with a pyramidal wooden roof several feet above the stones, and a bucket suspended by a rope hanging from the cover.
Do/did these wells exist, or are they just a cartooning convention? If they existed, how did one keep detritus out of the well without an airtight cover? Were they used for watering animals and such-like where you didn’t care if the water got a little gamey?
Yes they really existed although the architecture of the well house varied from place to place. I mentioned upthread that I have such a well on my property although the wooden part is gone. Such wells were hand-dug and were big enough for a man to go down into for the simple reason that a man had to go down into it in the first place to dig it. They were about the diameter of a wagon wheel. The Foxfire series of books specializing in old-timey arts has an excellent section on hand-digging a wheel. It was horribly dangerous even in the most favorable of circumstances.
The well-house on top was just common sense design. It kept the well covered, prevented kids from falling into it, and it housed the rope and buckets used to draw water. Wells of that type weren’t covered with a cap. They were used all the time and not much fell into them because of the well house with a roof overhead. Sanitation standards weren’t so high back in the day anyway although they knew to dig the well far away from livestock and human waste.
I know of a village well where I used to live in Wiltshire, England for several years. It was disused by the time I lived there and had a large concrete slab over it, but otherwise it did have the circular stone wall and the wooden roof.
Yes. I used to have a picture or two of the well, but I lost them in a hard drive crash. I’ve had to replace the bucket and the rope. I intend to build a new lid for and and rebuild the roof over it this winter and keep on using it.
Hand dug shallow wells were still quiet common in rural East Texas when I was a kids ('60s and 70s). About half the people had deep wells, the kind described upthread, but a lot of folks still used shallow wells with electric pumps. The community water system wasn’t available at my parent’s house until the late '70s.
My grandfather (from whom I inherited the farm) didn’t put in an electric pump and plumbing until about a year before he died. I haven’t felt a need to reconnect and repair the pump yet; the rope and pulley suit my weekend needs just fine.
I assume that when your body grows up with the untreated water, you develop resistance to whatever bacteria is present. The water is filtered by the iron sub soils. It leaves iron deposits in the buckets or plumbing over time, but otherwise, it’s very clean.
Like Zsofia said, it is cold. It’s about 60 degrees year round.
During the summer, I’ll fill a 5 gallon bucket and set it out in the sun to warm for an evening bath. In the winter, I’ll fill a metal bucket and sit it on the wood heater.
I grew up in a house with a well of a different design. We had a wellhouse in the back yard, which was visible as a roughly 10’ by 10’ concrete slab with a manhole and manhole cover in it. Pull the cover off, and you can drop yourself into a little cubicle underground room (there were some concrete blocks stacked under the manhole so you could reach).
Inside this room was a jet-type pump, and two pipes going into the floor through a round plate or flange. I believe the point of this setup was that the well itself was a small hole under that flange, and the pump sent water down one pipe, and a little venturi fitting at the bottom caused more water to come back up the other pipe.
There was also a water storage tank down there, and an air compressor, and a sump pump, and some other things. The electrical wiring was not very good, all the outlets were unpolarized and without grounds and there was no ground fault interruption. As a result, whenever it rained hard, the room would flood, and various things would tingle or downright kick you if you touched them. Which you did, of course, when you went down there to bail the thing out so the water would come back on in the house.
One thing I remember about the wiring in that house was that there were white and black wires run to the outlets, but the colors got ignored when they were connected, so whichever leg was hot was passing through various black and white wires on its way to wherever it was going. It all functioned, but there was nothing predictable about which leg was hot and which was neutral. I’m amazed I never got shocked worse than I did (though that sucked plenty bad whenever it happened). Just call me “flinchy”.
One problem with the Archimedes screw is that once you hooked it up, you would still need to install a serious pump if you wished to have running tap water for your shower, dishwasher, or other plumbing. The screw would move the water, (not very quickly), to the surface, but then it would have to be emptied into a tank from which the pump could send it to the rest of the house.
They are not as complicated as you might think. My pump (original to the house) gave out around five years ago. It is of the deep well jet pump (middle picture) design (pretty much as Napier has described). I have no plumbing training and I was able to install the new pump and a new pressure tank just following the directions Sears provided with the pump, (cross-checked to a Do-It-Yourself home instruction book).
I have no idea how deep my well is, as we got no information from the people from whom we bought the house. The well is actually in the basement. The house where my family moved when I was in high school had a basement well that failed a few years after I graduated college. My Mom had to have a new well driven and they put that in the side yard with a branch that entered the house through the wall where they put the pump assembly in the basement.
I am really glad that I do not have a submersible pump. (Both my Mom’s house in Michigan and our house are in glacial moraines where, I suspect, the water table is pretty high.) When Deb and I first married, we lived in Middlefield and the three rental units on the property were fed by a single well in a shed with a submersible pump. It failed while we lived there and it was a real hassle pulling the pump up and replacing it. (My landlord did the work, but I could see the labor he invested.) Submersibles cost more and need to be replaced more often. Of course, if you need water and the water table is down a hundred feet or a couple hundred feet, you don’t have a lot of options.
I’m not fond of the taste of our well water, (although it is better than the water at my Mom’s or my MIL’s), but Deb prefers well water to “city” water and I know several people who share her preference.
For complete systems a submersible generally runs a little bit more but not by a lot. Your comparing $2300 to $2500. Submersibles make up there cost in electricity as all the water they pump is sent to the user. Where a jet pump system will need to pump up to 50% back to operate the venturi.
A submersible should outlast an equivalent jet pump system. Even the better manufacturers still use some of the cheapest motors on their jet pumps under the concept that if it fails you can easily replace the motor. The pumps themselves on either have similar lifespans. We have a number of submersibles that have been in service over 30 years the same can not be said for jet pumps.
Average lifetime of a submersible is 10 years. Average on a jet pump is 8.
I can’t argue your averages, but, anecdotally, my Mom’s first jet pump had to be replaced after 22 years and her second is 31 years old. As far as I know, the pump I replaced was 40+.
(Perhaps we have shallow wells where the jet pump is overkill that reduces strain?)
I only needed to detach the lines at the head and attach the new system to them. I did not have to pull up any lines.
