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What We Covered
What happens to your water well when the power goes off? No more water!
In part 2 of this series on independent water systems (see part 1 here), we show you how to turn your conventional water well into an independent water system, so you aren’t dependent on the power company for the ability to have water.
In this episode:
- Why water wells are so vulnerable when the power goes out
- What are the 3 most important things to know about your well
- Where/how to find that info
- The must-have backup that every well needs
- Options for making your well as independent as possible
Chapters
00:00 – Intro
01:29 – The Problem With Water Wells
04:42 – The Ideal Water System
06:54 – The 3 Items You Need To Know About Your Well
18:45 – First Step To Making Your Well Independent (Hand Pump)
28:20 – The Next Step – Modern Options For Making Your Pressurized Well Water System Independent
36:18 – Final Checklist
38:34 – Questions and Sharing
Important Links
- Part 1 of this series (Springs & Creeks)
- Sustainable Preparedness – our website with details on how to make your homestead systems (water, power, heat, etc) more independent
- Bison Hand Pumps
- The Simple Pump
- Low power, low flow DC submersible pump (example: Aquatec SWP 4000, similar to the ShurFlo 9300)
- Other DC submersible pump options (Sun Pumps)
- Low power DC surface pumps (not submersible): Dankoff Solar Pumps
- Conventional AC pump with soft start that works great off the grid – Grundfos SQ series (not to be confused with the SQ Flex pump which is extremely versatile but it also much more expensive). Combined, we have used the SQ series for decades and it has been flawless, with the one exception that the check valve can give issues in sandy water, so just install an additional check valve immediately upline from the pump). I find that 1/2 – 3/4 horse power is sufficient for many scenarios, but each situation is different, so you really need to compare your needs against the performance charts and pick the one that fits your needs.
- Convention AC variable speed pump with soft start – Grundfos SQE series
- Most versatile (and expensive) pump series that can use almost any type of electricity and can pump from great depths – Grundfos SQ Flex series
Transcript
Hi, and welcome back to the Ready Life podcast. I’m Lisa, and I’m Nick Meisner. Today we’re going to be talking about water systems, specifically, we’re going to look at wells. Now this is part two. If you have not gotten a chance to check out the previous episode, you may want to go back and take a look at that one because that was part one where we covered some basics, and we also looked at a number of different water sources, such as springs and creeks, and we touched on rainwater a little bit too.
But in this episode, we’re focusing entirely on what is by far the most common water source, and that is a water well. Yes, most of us have water wells that live in the country at least. It’s very well protected. There are a lot of benefits to having a well. The least amount of fluctuation during seasons. Yes, the springs and creeks can fluctuate a lot. Wells don’t typically fluctuate as much.
Yeah, so they’re more reliable in that way. But there’s one major issue with a well. And what might that issue be? Well, to talk about that, let’s just think for a moment about the typical country water system. What does that look like? And I know there are a bunch of different slight variations, but the general theme being that you have this well, this deep hole in the ground, and you got water sitting in the bottom of that hole in the ground, and you gotta somehow get the water up out of the ground to your house and pressurize the house.
And it uses an electric submersible pump, typically, unless it’s a really shallow well, and then it might be an electric jet pump. But either way, it’s an electric pump that’s getting the water out of the well, pushing it over to the house, and then pressurizing the household water system and… in the house or somewhere along that line is a diaphragm tank, sometimes called a pressure tank or a bladder tank, and that tank is what keeps your whole house pressurized when the pump is not running.
So the pump runs for a little while, builds the pressure up, then the pump turns off, and that pressure tank keeps your house pressurized and supplies you with water for a little while until you use it and the pressure goes down, down. and then at some point in time, the pressure gets low enough where the pump turns back on again and the whole thing starts all over again. And there is, you know, like I said, there are different variations.
Nowadays variable speed pumps are becoming more popular where you don’t really rely as much on a pressure tank. The pump can run at various speeds and it basically turns on whenever you’re using water in the house. But it still is the same general idea. An electric pump is pushing the water into your house and pressurizing it for you. So the obvious question is, what is the dependency with this kind of a system? Well, the dependency is that electric pump. No power, no water. That’s right. And so we have gotten ourselves into a bit of a pickle in America these days, where we are as a whole in rural America, we know that folks in the city, on the city water, are dependent upon the municipal water authority for their water. But even folks in rural America, almost everybody is entirely dependent upon the power company for their water, no less. I know. And this is one of the basic necessities of life. You can’t have a garden to grow food. You can’t wa- like you can’t do- like water is essential for life itself. And so when you have something… I might say, this is why we make such a big deal about off-grid power systems.
That’s true, that’s true. Because electricity is not a basic necessity of life. But because we rely on electric pumps in order to have water, it then sort of by default becomes a necessity. Because we’ve made it one. Exactly, exactly. So today we’re gonna talk about ways that you can set up your water system at home as independently as possible. That’s right. So in order to have the, this is something that we talked about in the previous episode, so you may remember this, but I have five basic principles that I go by that define what for me would be the ideal water system. As we mentioned previously, most of us are not going to have the perfect, the absolute perfect water system.
There are a few of them out there, and we describe to you what it looks like, but I’m just going to repeat these just so that this is kind of our north star of this is what we’re trying to get as close to as possible. And that would be number one, no electricity required. What’s number two? So number two is nothing mechanical to malfunction. Okay. Number three would be having good pressure at the house where you can take a good shower and have actually running water rather than hauling water in buckets. And then it’s quantity. You want plenty of water, or at least at the very minimum enough water to support your household and agriculture needs. Right, and finally, you’d want the quality of the water to be very pure. These five items, no electricity, nothing mechanical, good pressure, plenty of quantity, and good purity, very pure. Those make up the ultimate water system. And so naturally with a well, it’s kind of disqualified from being the ultimate water system because it’s going to at least require something mechanical if not an electric pump to get the water out of the well.
So right there out of the bat, we can see it’s not gonna necessarily be the ideal system, but I’m here to tell you, that you can still set up a very good independent water system with a well. And it, like we mentioned earlier, it’s got some advantages going for it that the other water sources don’t have. That’s right, that’s right. So a well, how does a well work? In order to really think about ways to make our well independent, we need to kind of understand how a well works. So how does a well work? So some basic anatomy, just a few things, a few basic concepts that we need to understand about a well. One would be the overall depth of the well.
Obviously when the well is drilled, they go to a certain depth depending upon the homeowner’s budget or how deep the water is, these kinds of factors. You know, hopefully you hit water shallow enough where they don’t have to go deep, but if they do have to go deep, then it’s usually your budget that stops them. And so that’s dictating the depth of the well. That’s one piece of information that you’re gonna need to know about your well. Another important piece of information that you need to know is the static water level. Now what’s the static water level? That sounds kind of technical. It does sound technical.
The static water level is simply how deep the water is in your well. So, you know, if you have a well that’s 300 feet deep that you dug. but the water fills it up to about 100 feet deep, then you’ve got 200 feet of water there in your well. Your static water level would be at 100 feet. Right. Even though your well is 300 feet deep. Yes, and something interesting to note about wells, they’re really funny because there’s a lot of forces at play here. And so when they were drilling that well, they might have hit water at, let’s say, 100 feet.
And then they might have kept on going down to 300 feet. And so you’d think, oh, well, the static water level would be at 100 feet, but not necessarily. That static water level could be at 50 feet or 25 feet, pretty close to the surface, even though the water was first hit at 100 feet, just because the aquifers underground can be exerting pressure and water is always seeking for equilibrium. And so, you can have things like that happen. And so the static water level is separate and distinct from the overall depth of the well, and it’s also separate and distinct from where the well driller first hit water. So a lot of us know how deep our wells are.
You know, you will go around and like, oh, my well is, you know, 100 feet deep or 25 feet deep or. you know, 380 feet deep. And we know that because we paid by the foot for that well. We paid dearly for that thing. And so even when you go buy a house, they’re like, oh yeah, this is a 300 foot, you know, deep well. But nobody really talks about the static water level. Static water level is actually almost more important than how deep your well is. It is, it is, and here’s why.
So in this well, keeping with our example of a 300 foot well, the submersible pump submersible pump means that it’s submersed in the water and in a deep well, that’s what it’s gonna be. It’s gonna be a submersible pump. It may be down right near the bottom of the well, not actually at the bottom, but fairly close to the bottom is where they’re typically put. And so you might think that pump is having to fight 300 feet of gravity, because it’s 300 feet down roughly from the surface, but not so. And that is because water is always seeking for equilibrium, one of those immutable principles.
And so when you’ve got this pipe running down inside the well down to the pump, once the pipe gets down to the static water level, the water that is surrounding that pipe is seeking for equilibrium and it ends up equalizing with the water inside the pipe. So the water outside
NICK & LISA:
Hi, and welcome back to the Ready Life podcast. I’m Lisa, and I’m Nick Meisner. Today, we’re going to be talking about water systems—specifically, we’re going to look at wells. Now, this is part two. If you have not gotten a chance to check out the previous episode, you may want to go back and take a look at that one because that was part one where we covered some basics, and we also looked at a number of different water sources, such as springs and creeks, and we touched on rainwater a little bit too.
But in this episode, we’re focusing entirely on what is by far the most common water source, and that is a water well. Yes, most of us have water wells that live in the country at least. It’s very well protected. There are a lot of benefits to having a well. The least amount of fluctuation during seasons. Yes, the springs and creeks can fluctuate a lot. Wells don’t typically fluctuate as much.
Yeah, so they’re more reliable in that way. But there’s one major issue with a well. And what might that issue be? Well, to talk about that, let’s just think for a moment about the typical country water system. What does that look like? And I know there are a bunch of different slight variations, but the general theme being that you have this well, this deep hole in the ground, and you got water sitting in the bottom of that hole in the ground, and you gotta somehow get the water up out of the ground to your house and pressurize the house.
And it uses an electric submersible pump, typically, unless it’s a really shallow well, and then it might be an electric jet pump. But either way, it’s an electric pump that’s getting the water out of the well, pushing it over to the house, and then pressurizing the household water system and… in the house or somewhere along that line is a diaphragm tank, sometimes called a pressure tank or a bladder tank, and that tank is what keeps your whole house pressurized when the pump is not running.
So the pump runs for a little while, builds the pressure up, then the pump turns off, and that pressure tank keeps your house pressurized and supplies you with water for a little while until you use it and the pressure goes down, down. And then at some point in time, the pressure gets low enough where the pump turns back on again and the whole thing starts all over again. And there is, you know, like I said, there are different variations.
Nowadays variable speed pumps are becoming more popular where you don’t really rely as much on a pressure tank. The pump can run at various speeds and it basically turns on whenever you’re using water in the house. But it still is the same general idea. An electric pump is pushing the water into your house and pressurizing it for you. So the obvious question is, what is the dependency with this kind of a system? Well, the dependency is that electric pump. No power, no water. That’s right. And so we have gotten ourselves into a bit of a pickle in America these days, where we are as a whole in rural America, we know that folks in the city, on the city water, are dependent upon the municipal water authority for their water. But even folks in rural America, almost everybody is entirely dependent upon the power company for their water, no less. I know. And this is one of the basic necessities of life. You can’t have a garden to grow food. You can’t wa- like you can’t do- like water is essential for life itself. And so when you have something… I might say, this is why we make such a big deal about off-grid power systems.
That’s true, that’s true. Because electricity is not a basic necessity of life. But because we rely on electric pumps in order to have water, it then sort of by default becomes a necessity. Because we’ve made it one. Exactly, exactly. So today we’re going to talk about ways that you can set up your water system at home as independently as possible. That’s right. So in order to have the, this is something that we talked about in the previous episode, so you may remember this, but I have five basic principles that I go by that define what for me would be the ideal water system. As we mentioned previously, most of us are not going to have the perfect, the absolute perfect water system.
There are a few of them out there, and we describe to you what it looks like, but I’m just going to repeat these just so that this is kind of our north star of this is what we’re trying to get as close to as possible. And that would be number one, no electricity required. What’s number two? So number two is nothing mechanical to malfunction. Okay. Number three would be having good pressure at the house where you can take a good shower and have actually running water rather than hauling water in buckets. And then it’s quantity. You want plenty of water, or at least at the very minimum enough water to support your household and agriculture needs. Right, and finally, you’d want the quality of the water to be very pure. These five items, no electricity, nothing mechanical, good pressure, plenty of quantity, and good purity, very pure. Those make up the ultimate water system. And so naturally with a well, it’s kind of disqualified from being the ultimate water system because it’s going to at least require something mechanical if not an electric pump to get the water out of the well.
So right there out of the bat, we can see it’s not going to necessarily be the ideal system, but I’m here to tell you, that you can still set up a very good independent water system with a well. And it, like we mentioned earlier, it’s got some advantages going for it that the other water sources don’t have. That’s right, that’s right. So a well, how does a well work? In order to really think about ways to make our well independent, we need to kind of understand how a well works. So how does a well work? So some basic anatomy, just a few things, a few basic concepts that we need to understand about a well. One would be the overall depth of the well.
Obviously when the well is drilled, they go to a certain depth depending upon the homeowner’s budget or how deep the water is, these kinds of factors. You know, hopefully you hit water shallow enough where they don’t have to go deep, but if they do have to go deep, then it’s usually your budget that stops them. And so that’s dictating the depth of the well. That’s one piece of information that you’re going to need to know about your well. Another important piece of information that you need to know is the static water level. Now what’s the static water level? That sounds kind of technical. It does sound technical.
The static water level is simply how deep the water is in your well. So, you know, if you have a well that’s 300 feet deep that you dug. but the water fills it up to about 100 feet deep, then you’ve got 200 feet of water there in your well. Your static water level would be at 100 feet. Right. Even though your well is 300 feet deep. Yes, and something interesting to note about wells, they’re really funny because there’s a lot of forces at play here. And so when they were drilling that well, they might have hit water at, let’s say, 100 feet.
And then they might have kept on going down to 300 feet. And so you’d think, oh, well, the static water level would be at 100 feet, but not necessarily. That static water level could be at 50 feet or 25 feet, pretty close to the surface, even though the water was first hit at 100 feet, just because the aquifers underground can be exerting pressure and water is always seeking for equilibrium. And so, you can have things like that happen. And so the static water level is separate and distinct from the overall depth of the well, and it’s also separate and distinct from where the well driller first hit water. So a lot of us know how deep our wells are.
You know, you will go around and like, oh, my well is, you know, 100 feet deep or 25 feet deep or. you know, 380 feet deep. And we know that because we paid by the foot for that well. We paid dearly for that thing. And so even when you go buy a house, they’re like, oh yeah, this is a 300-foot, you know, deep well. But nobody really talks about the static water level. Static water level is actually almost more important than how deep your well is. It is, it is, and here’s why.
So in this well, keeping with our example of a 300-foot well, the submersible pump submersible pump means that it’s submerged in the water and in a deep well, that’s what it’s going to be. It’s going to be a submersible pump. It may be down right near the bottom of the well, not actually at the bottom, but fairly close to the bottom is where they’re typically put. And so you might think that pump is having to fight 300 feet of gravity, because it’s 300 feet down roughly from the surface, but not so. And that is because water is always seeking for equilibrium, one of those immutable principles.
And so when you’ve got this pipe running down inside the well down to the pump, once the pipe gets down to the static water level, the water that is surrounding that pipe is seeking for equilibrium and it ends up equalizing with the water inside the pipe. So the water outside of that pipe that’s surrounding it equalizes with the water inside, and the effect is that you basically get a free ride up to the static water level. So that point from 300 feet down up to the static water level of 100 feet, that is effectively, the pump is not fighting gravity during that space. So it only starts fighting gravity once it gets above that hundred feet. Exactly. It’s only fighting that last hundred feet of gravity.
And then, of course, if your well is downhill from the house, then it’s got to fight gravity to get it up to the house. And then also, if it’s going to build up pressure in your house, then that’s basically the same as fighting gravity as well. But to get it to the surface, you’re only looking at the static water level. How far? That’s the distance; that’s the amount of gravity that the pump is having to fight. And that is why the static water level is important because that is going to help us determine exactly which pump we need because just like with tools, there are different pumps for different jobs.
One pump that might work great with a shallow static water level would be completely unsuitable for a deep static water level. So it’s an important piece of information you’ll need. You’re going to have to have a more powerful pump to pump 200 feet than you would 25 feet, in other words.
So how do we find out this information, though? Oh, and another piece of information that’s useful to know I just about forgot about your well is the yield of the well, gallons per minute. How many gallons per minute does that well yield? And the kind of the golden rule or the golden standard minimum that you’d like to see in a well is five gallons per minute. You’d like to see at least five gallons per minute. My understanding is that a lot of banks, when they’re considering giving a loan on a property, they want to see a minimum of five gallons per minute on the well. And that’s for a reason. You want the well to be able to keep up with the pump. If the pump is pumping faster than the well can produce, then it’s going to eventually pump the well dry. And that’s not a good situation. It doesn’t make for a good long-term thing. So that’s the general rule of thumb. You could certainly live with less than five gallons per minute. And we, in an upcoming episode, are going to talk to you about that. It’s not ideal, but it can certainly be done, and there are a lot of strategies you can use for making a low flow well work for you. But if you’re still in the looking stage, bear that in mind that you’d like it to be better than five gallons per minute.
So how do you find out this information, these three pieces, the depth of the well, the depth of the static water level, and the yield of the well? Well, more often than not, you can go to a county GIS and download the well log for that specific well for the property that you may be interested in or maybe the property that you already own and you just don’t know what your static water level is. Now, what is the county GIS?
So the county GIS, it’s a good question. I know how to describe it. It’s basically, I don’t remember what the acronym stands for, but I think geographical information system or something like that. Anyway, a lot of counties these days have this master map that’s online that has all kinds of information. It has all the property borders. Some of them will even have the names of the owners and all kinds of information like that. And some of them may have the well log available there for any wells that are in the area. Or in some states or counties, it might be a separate system. For instance, in Idaho, you go to the Idaho Department of Water Resources website, and you can search there based upon the address, the tag number on the well, or you can even look at a map and just click on wells there. And if it was drilled in recent years, there’s probably a well log that was filed by the well driller when he drilled it. And it’s going to have all this important information on it, a lot of, and a whole lot more, a lot of interesting stuff about your well. But it’s going to have these three important pieces of information, the depth of the well, overall depth of the well, the depth of the static water level, and the yield, how many gallons per minute that well is producing.
Now, is this well log the Bible or is it the absolute truth? Is it accurate? Is it accurate, right? Unfortunately, well logs are not always the most accurate. And it’s not necessarily because the well driller did an inaccurate job of testing or checking the static water level or the depth. It’s because the aquifers can have pressures exerted upon them that will change the static water level or the yield, perhaps. For instance, a neighbor comes and pops a well in, and they’re pumping 20 gallons a minute, 24 hours a day out of their well. That could very well have an impact on your well because you’re both likely pulling from the same aquifer.
When I say aquifer, you might be thinking of some of these great aquifers like on the Great Plains and things like that, but actually almost everywhere, the vast majority of wells are tapping into some form of aquifer just on a smaller scale. They may not be one of these great big massive aquifers, but it could be an aquifer that’s 50 acres in size or 1,000 acres or whatever. And so a lot of these are large enough where they could be multiple wells tapping into these small aquifers, and that can definitely have an impact on you. So that’s one reason that a well log might not be accurate on static water level. But for yield, like how many gallons per minute? That is, even from the get-go, that is a very suspect number. When I say suspect, just not terribly accurate. It’s a rough guess, it’s an educated guess. There was not, unless the well-driller or pump installer ran, or unless the well-driller ran an actual pump test, then that really is not an accurate number. Think of it as a really, really rough, educated guess of how much. And things can change over time, too. It’s not just the neighbors; it’s other factors also, seismic plates shifting around, cracks, and all sorts of things like that. So the point is, take it with a big grain of salt. If the well was drilled pretty recently, then chances are the well log is going to be reasonably accurate. But if it was drilled a long time ago, who knows? Yeah, it could have changed. And it might not be a bad idea to get it tested. Yeah, exactly. So that way, you know where your static water level is exactly and what your actual yield is.
Now that we have a basic understanding of wells and the well anatomy, what we need to know about our well, what are ways that we can make our well independent? So starting out, the very first thing I got to mention, because it’s something that most people could do to their well right now, and that is to add a hand pump. This is a great first step in making your well, or getting your water system where it’s more independent. No, it’s not ideal because if you lose your power, then you’re down to hauling water in buckets. But at least you can get water out of that hole in the ground. I mean, and it’s completely non-electric, it’s mechanical. As a general rule, if it’s a good quality hand pump, they’re going to be quite reliable. And so I feel like that is a really good first step. We’ll talk about how to take it beyond that in just a minute here. And if you’re able to do that right away, then by all means, go the full nine yards. But if you aren’t in a position or aren’t ready to set up a full-fledged independent water system that provides running water to your house, then at least get a hand pump in there.
One issue that I’ve heard though, hand pumps are brought up is my well is like 300 feet deep so I can’t use a hand pump on my well, right? Yeah, so here’s the thing about hand pumps. Once again, we are looking at the static water level. So, and we talked about this a few minutes ago, this is another reason why static water level is so important is because that hand pump… Unlike your electric submersible pump, the hand pump is not typically going to run all the way down to the bottom of the well. It’s going to run down to the water level and then a little bit past it to a safe depth, whatever appears to be a safe depth to allow for a certain amount of fluctuation and have the cylinder that’s down at the bottom still be covered with water. And so the static water level is gonna be your rule of thumb, you know, 20, 40 feet, something like that, below the static water level is where you’re gonna want to go as a general rule. And hand pumps are actually able to deal with some reasonably deep static water levels. It’s surprising. It used to be, years ago, I used to tell folks that most hand pumps can only go to 200 feet. But nowadays, they’ve advanced with the design of hand pumps, and there are at least a couple of them I know of that can go to 300 feet or even a little beyond that. Wow, that’s incredible. Now granted, at 300 feet, you’re pumping harder, and you’re not getting as much water per stroke. So these are the two factors at play. Either you’re going to pump harder and get the same amount of water or you’re going to pump the same amount of power and get less water. But at least you can still get water at depth.
So in order to install a hand pump on my well, am I gonna have to pull the electric pump out or how does that work? So it depends upon—I’m gonna have to give the lawyer answer here—it depends. But most wells, you know, a very common size of well is a six-inch casing, and with a six-inch casing, hand pumps can very easily coexist with your current electric pump and go side by side. So no, the electric pump would not need to be pulled in that case.
If the casing is smaller than that, then it gets a little more interesting, and either way, I would highly recommend that you reach out to the hand pump manufacturer. They are going to want you to do that because they are going to need to know the specs for your well. They’re going to have you measure the casing, and they’re gonna need to know the static water level and various things like this. And then they’re going to help you with picking out the best parts and putting together the best system for your particular well.
This is not the kind of purchase where you wanna just go on a website and click a buy now button and be done with it. This is one of those purchases where you really need to talk to a human and work with them to figure out the specifics because there’s a lot of variables at play here. So like I said, six inches, you should be just fine. Four inches, it can still be done. It just gets a little more interesting. But yes, the two can coexist in the same well, which is really awesome. Then you keep using your electric pump as long as you can, and your hand pump is sitting there as a backup just waiting for when you need it.
And one other thing, sorry. Just one other thing I wanted to mention about hand pumps is that if you’re in cold country where it freezes up, well, and there’s even a lot of places in the south where it freezes up, you might be wondering, well, how do you keep it from freezing up? Just real quick, you drill a little pinhole in the pipeline where the water is getting pumped up. You drill a little pinhole. They’ll tell you the exact size. And you drill it just below the frost level. And when you’re pumping… the water that’s pumping up by the hand pump, it way more than overpowers that little bit of a pinhole. And so you get water out. But as soon as you stop pumping, the water slowly drains down to the level of that pinhole and then it’s empty, there’s nothing to freeze up. And so that’s how it works with a hand pump in freezing conditions. Wow, that is so cool.
So what are some good quality hand pumps? Well, there are… a couple that I recommend, but there’s a variety of options. In fact, we should probably show you a little clip of one in action. Oh yes. You wanna see one in action? I do, I do. Okay, and yeah, for those of you that are listening, this pump that I’m about to play you a clip of, it is one of the old-fashioned cast iron hand pumps that you may have seen that, like Lemons and places like that carry. They’re—I don’t feel like they’re ideal, I don’t feel like they’re the best, but they can be quite workable, and especially for shallower static water levels, they can work fine. And anyhow, it’s interesting to hear from someone who actually uses one. In fact, this particular hand pump is one friend of ours is gonna be showing it in this clip, and we actually helped him install the hand pump. So here it is.
VIDEO CLIP:
“Well, this particular pump I purchased from Lehman’s catalog out of Lehman’s catalog. As you can see, I’ll pump here a little bit. It takes about three to four good pumps to get water. And I have timed this out and I can pump about five gallons of water in approximately five minutes. Like I say, with this particular pump here, you have to put a lot, pretty good effort in there because you’re having to pull the water and you’re having to pull your pump rods up. So you’ve got to exert quite a bit of energy, but it’s better than not having any water at all.”
NICK & LISA:
That was awesome. I want a hand pump now. Yes.
So you were asking about brands, what are some good brands. That particular one, I believe, is made by Baker Manufacturing, it’s called the Monitor, I believe. But like I said, there’s some others that I prefer nowadays over that one, and so my top of the line, my favorite hand pump is the Bison hand pump. Bison is in a Buffalo, and it’s stainless steel, really heavy-duty, and they keep tweaking it and working on it to come out with different variations to deal with different scenarios and to help it be able to pump from greater depths. It can go down to 300 or more feet of static water level. Wow. Really heavy duty, nice, nice setup.
The other hand pump that is a good option is the simple pump. That’s the name of it, the simple pump. And it’s not as heavy duty, but it is able to pump from, I believe, even greater depths than the Bison. And it’s got a lot of interesting possible accessories. For instance, they sell a little DC motor that could be powered with a solar panel, and that could actually power the hand pump for you so that you didn’t have to manually pump it. Some things like that. So that’s an interesting option as well. But either of those are good. Like I said, my favorite would be Bison. But those are some good options that I would take a look at. But bottom line is every well needs a hand pump. Unless your static water level is so deep that there’s just no way it will work, every well needs a hand pump so that you at least have a non-electric mechanical backup for this most basic necessity of life, water. Yes, that is so true.
Well, It’s very nostalgic, the idea of going out and using a hand pump and collecting water and all of that. But I’ll be honest, with two kids and a busy household, I don’t have time for that. I don’t have time for what I’m already doing. But so what are some more convenient options? Of course, we want to have the hand pump on the well as a backup in case our electric pump fails or whatever other reason might be. Or maybe you’re still on the power grid, and you just need to start with a backup. That really is the first place you need to start is with getting a hand pump on your well. But now we want to move beyond a hand pump. We want something that’s independent and convenient. Right.
As I think you’ve gathered by now, if you want to have running water in your house and you don’t really want to be using a hand pump all the time, then it is going to require an electric pump. So what we’re gonna do is start out for really the most basic configuration of an independent water system that is still convenient would be the typical country water system. We looked at that at the beginning of this episode where you have an electric submersible pump; it’s pumping the water up to the house, and there’s a pressure tank, and the pump runs, pumps the pressure up, so on and so forth.
We’re gonna take that system and ever so slightly modify it and make two changes. One is the type of pump that’s in the well. We’re going to use probably a little bit different pump than what you might have right now. There seems to be a tendency with well drillers or well pump guys to oversize the pumps. They wanna make sure that the pump is plenty powerful for what you need. And when you’re on the grid, that’s great. You know, that’s good practice. If you’re producing your own power, you kind of want to design the system where the pump is only as large as it absolutely has to be. And so that’s one thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna choose carefully our pump, find the most efficient one that we can.
It can still be a conventional pump, an AC pump, 120 or 240-volt pump, but we want it to be the smallest that will fulfill our needs. And I find that a lot of systems probably the majority of systems could do fine with a 1 1/2 horsepower or 3/4 horsepower pump. And both of those are completely feasible to do off the grid and with a solar power system. So that’s gonna be one change that we’re gonna make is the type of pump and then the second change is how you power that pump. And for that, we would use, ideally what I’d like to see you do is set up an off-grid power system for your home, and that also powers the pump and your well.
Yes, you could certainly set up a small off-grid power system just for the pump and your well. You could totally do that. And that would be less expensive than setting up the off-grid power system that’s large enough for your whole house. But, you know, then if you were to decide to upgrade and do it for your whole house, then you would have just wasted the money that you spent on designing this whole system for your well. So it’s up to you, whatever floats your boat, that’s just my two cents worth is that particular option.
Now, that is one way. Another option that a lot of folks have taken an interest in the last, oh, I don’t know, 10, 20 years, something like that, is a solar direct water pumping system. And that’s basically where you have a super efficient DC pump down in the well. When I say DC pump, DC is the type of electricity that solar panels produce and that batteries run off of and things like that. AC is the kind of power that you have in your house and the conventional power when you plug your outlet in, right? But this pump is a DC pump. There’s a variety of DC submersible pumps out there. And so you’re going to put a DC submersible pump in the well, and then you can set up a solar array, a small solar array that’s appropriately sized for powering that pump, and there are pumps that can run straight off of solar panels where that’s basically it, just the solar panels, charge controller, and the pump, and that’s essentially about it. And so then whenever it’s a sunny day and there’s enough sunshine hitting the solar panels, that pump is pumping away.
So where does that water go? Well, a couple of things to note here, DC pumps are typically slow. And so that means that we’re probably not going to be able to pump straight into the house and pressurize our house with this DC pump because you might be using a lot of water. If you’ve… And if it’s a slow pump, then it’s not going to give you much pressure. It’s not going to keep up with your needs. You know, if you’re running a load of wash in the washer, and somebody’s taking a shower and somebody’s doing the dishes in the kitchen sink, that could be a good number of gallons per minute, and that pump just is not going to keep up with you, most likely. So with a DC slow pump like this, it’s going to pump the water up into a cistern. Ideally, we’d like to see that cistern be up a hill, up above your house. That would be the perfect scenario for a well with a solar direct system. If you could get the cistern at least 60 vertical feet above your house, we talked about this last week in the episode about springs and how to deal with them. We talked about the gravity principle and how when you get your cistern way up above your house, 60 vertical feet or so or more, that gravity will push the water down and pressurize the water system in your house with no additional pump required. So that would be awesome if we could do that. And then whenever it’s sunny, that pump is pumping away, filling that cistern up the hill, and then from there, the water flows down to your house with pressure, and your system is pressurized. And that’s a beautiful system, as long as you get consistent sunshine, and as long as you have enough storage.
So my concerns with this kind of a system is what do you do if you encounter an extended period of time with not much sunshine? Then I would want to make sure that you’ve got some backups in place, that you have an alternate way to power that system. That’s why I personally prefer that for something as essential as water, I would like to have battery backup and where I’ve got multiple ways to charge things up and power that pump. I feel like redundancy is a good idea here. But if you’re in a location like Arizona or somewhere where you get really, really consistent sun, then that could be a great option. Lots of people do this. And it’s a beautiful thing. And it can be a lot less expensive than setting up a whole off-grid power system. So that’s just another way. These are just ideas. We’re throwing out things that have worked, options. But this is by no means the only way to deal with these systems. If there’s nothing else that you get from these two episodes on water systems, I want you to go away with this one principle of use your creativity and try and think things through of, are there any possible options that I can implement to make this work? Because a lot of times there are.
And that kind of brings us to our final checklist that we. discussed on the last episode as well, but I wanted to finish up with this. And so what are these four points on our checklist that you always want to remember when you’re dealing with an independent water system?
So first of all, you always test the water from any water source before you drink it. That’s really key and important. Even a well. For any water, even for a well. Yes, you always want to test the water before you use it for drinking. So you know what you’re dealing with. You know, you can add filtration if needed, or you know what, then you can figure out what to do with it, but you need to know what you’re dealing with first.
Second would be, if possible, check the water source during the driest time of the year. This isn’t quite as important with a well because wells typically don’t fluctuate as much with the seasons as springs and things like that do, but just a general rule of thumb there.
Then the next thing is if the amount of water at a place that you’re looking at is questionable, persist in looking for a better water setup. So if you don’t already have property and you’re just looking, then if water is questionable at all, walk away and find another option. That’s right, it’s one of your most basic necessities. So don’t compromise on the water.
But if you already have a water system, if you’re already locked into something and you find that it’s not an ideal situation, then I want to encourage you that, as I mentioned before, use your God-given ingenuity. Usually, some sort of a solution can be worked out. There’s all kind of options. The sky is the limit. I mean, I’m continually stumbling upon new options and new ways to do things. And I’ve had a lot of exposure to a lot of different water systems, and I still am finding out about new options for things. So be of good cheer. There very well may be a way to make it out and to make it work.
And this reminds me that if you have any questions, as always, please send your questions in to us so that we can maybe help you out. Bring that up as a question of the week, how to deal with a particular scenario that you’re faced with or whatever. So if you have any questions that you’d like us to address, send them in to questions@thereadylife.com, and we’d love to hear from you.
And also, we’d love it if you could help us with sharing and getting the word out about this podcast. Leave a review on whatever your preferred podcast platform is. And yeah, send us a note and let us know how like… What we can help with, how we can be most helpful. Yes, please. I mean, we’re wasting our time here if we’re not doing content that is really helping you. So that would be super helpful to us is to hear from you if something was helpful or if not. If we’re not covering things that are helpful to you, tell us what you need to hear so that we can do what would really be a blessing to you and help you to become more independent and more self-reliant. That’s our goal is to help you get into a position where you can place less and less dependence upon the systems for your basic necessities of life.
Anyhow. That’s pretty much what we wanted to share with you about this. We’ll have lots more on water in the future. Don’t worry. This was just kind of an overview of the theory of independent water systems. Like I said, we’ve got some other stuff coming up about dealing with low-yield water systems and all sorts of other things. So we’ll be back with more. Don’t worry. Thank you so much for joining us today. And we’ll see you next time. See you then.
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