The Well Lives!

Our house had an old irrigation well when we moved in…

I realize this isn't the best picture, but I never noticed that I didn't take a good head on picture before we tore it apart. Oops! The pump was ancient, there was a large blue pressure tank, and a mess of pipes. Oh, and erm…it didn't work. 

We really wanted to use this to irrigate our lawn (yes, the one we don’t have…yet) so first thing first…we removed the pressure tank and old pump. We bought a new pump, and with not so high hopes, hooked it up and turned it on.

Nothing happened.

Not a huge surprise to us, but still disappointing.

After tinkering with it on and off for a while we enlisted the help of my dad. We had an enclosed well casing so we couldn't see down in the well. The boys ended up taking the cap off the well and finding a galvanized drop pipe in there and came to the conclusion that this pipe was clogged. So out that pipe came.

Way easier said than done! The pipe was pretty heavy (maybe 150 + pounds) and about 30 feet long! I ended up on the roof to support the weight at the top while The Engineer and my dad dead lifted it out the well a few feet at a time.

We finally walked it out and found that the check valve at the bottom was indeed crusted shut.

Ain't no water getting through there! At least we knew what the problem was and could get a move on. We roughly hooked it up to make sure the system would work and finally got water!

This gave us a green light to go full steam ahead and we started putting everything else together. We fabricated a new drop pipe out of PVC (instead of galvanized pipe) and dropped it in the same way we took the last one out...from the roof. 

The Engineer trenched to the new pump location (we moved the fence back a few feet which made room for the pump around the corner....which I talked about in this post) and glued all the piping from the well to the pump.

After a two hour stop at Home Depot we came home with a bunch of PVC pipe and fittings, sprinkler heads, timers, manifolds…you name it, we had it. We were working each evening after work so The Engineer got to work trenching and laying more pipe while I was working on moving the fence and finished digging up our shell path so we would be ready to till the yard before laying sod.

We are beyond happy that we were able to revive our old well without digging a new one for our irrigation. Next task is laying the new irrigation system!