Dear Mr. Rawles:
I have owned my retreat for some years and as unbelievable as it may sound, I found a water well that I didn’t know I had. When I bought the land in the 1990s, I knew that there had been an old house there at one time, but assumed that they had either used a cistern, or drew water from the stream that runs through the property. However, I found the well. It had an old Gould’s 1HP pump at the end of 120 ft. of 2″ galvanized pipe. The well had been capped for years, or so it looked when I opened it. Incidentally, there is water at about 60 ft. down. There is no record at the county [offices], nor with the local water management board, for this well. I do not intend to report this find either. They know about the well I drilled a few years ago when we
A question: How can I best develop this well for use and still maintain strict OPSEC? My retreat is shielded from a county road by a large grove of trees, so from the road nobody sees anything, not the house, the barn or anything! The well is about a half mile from the county road in a grove of trees.
One bit of advice: Recruit a veterinarian, physician or even a dentist into your Group if at all possible. They are out there, and are not all of us Liberal Socialists.
Regards, – Robert F., MD
JWR Replies: Congratulations on your find! If you use a poly service line, you can install a well pump by yourself. (The pipe is flexible and fairly lightweight. Since the prices of photovoltaic panels have dropped dramatically in the past two years, you should probably go ahead and put in a PV system, with inverter, to power an AC well pump. (The line loss for a DC well pump hanging at 100 feet would be tremendous.) Bob at Ready Made Resources (one of our advertisers) does free-of-charge consulting on alternative power system specifications. They can let you know how many panels you’ll need, the inverter specifications, et cetera. If you install cistern for gravity flow to your house, you can even install a PV system without any batteries, that is simplicity itself: when there is sun it pumps, and when there isn’t, it doesn’t. (A float switch will stop the pump whenever the cistern is full.)