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question about new well
Young Hunter
Member Posts: 58 ✭✭
my neighbor just got a new well today, 360' and 4 gallons per minute. this was the second try, first hole 500' and no water. will 4 gallons per minute be enough for normal home use?
Comments
the factors that determine this are1 how deep is your well 2 how far down to the water 3 how much water does the well generate...a well that is 100 feet deep with 50 feet of water that generates one gallon per minute will run a home as long as you don't waste water or use to many faucets at one time...most pumps pump about 10 gallons a minute but you can normally only get about 3 to 5 per minute in the home...so if you had 50 feet of water that is fifty gallons and that can be replaced at 1 gallon per minute so..at 5 gallons per minute you would have 12 minutes of water usage out of a 1 inch pipe before you compromised your well but since most water lines in a home are 1/2 and then reduced even more you could get even more time than that...now if your well produces more water then you can use more water...you get one gallon of water per foot of water in a standard 6 inch well...my well is 300 feet with one hundred feet of water and only produces 1/2 gallon of water per minute and we can have never had any problems as long as we don't waste none...but we cannot use a water hose to water the lawn or wash cars...
If you are in an area where above ground storage tanks are allowed (in other words where it doesn't freeze for long periods of time)
that is more than enough. If your thinking of filling a swimming pool, then no it's not enough.
If it's a steady 4 gallons a minute I believe that you could get a building permit (in most areas) with that much.
Margaret Thatcher
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics."
Mark Twain
Just for comparison, your milage may vary.
(Oh, yeah, 3/4 hp deep pump.)
The pump will produce 18 gal./min. Most 1 HP pumps won't, but then, I have postive static water.
In other words...
My well is free flowing artesian. The artesian flows at 4 gal./min. at 4 pounds of pressure.[:D][8D][:)]
I call it my water on loan from God.
I doubt I'll ever run out of water.
Critter.
So, let's say that your neighbor has 200 feet of water standing in the well. The pump is never put on the bottom, let's say the pump is 50 feet from the bottom. He has 300 gallons of water standing above the pump.
If he took a long shower and used 30 gallons of water, and his wife washed the dishes and used 20 gallons of water, and his son took a long shower and used 30 gallons of water, and mom did the laundry and used 30 gallons of water, all in an hour, they would have used 110 gallons in an hour. This is extremely heavy water usage.
In that hour, 240 gallons of water would have flowed back into the well, if there was room for it.
They have plenty of water as long as they don't build a swimming pool, even then, they could fill a pool if they did it carefully.
The rule of thumb is that the minimum to run a household on is 1.5 gallons per minute, but here again it depends upon how much water stands on top of that pump.
we bury 3000 gallon fiberglass tanks at the surface,. the water is from 600 to 1100' deep.
the fiberglass tank has float switches that turn the downhole pump on when the tank gets down a foot or so.
then there is an above ground booster pump and 3 or 4 pressure tanks, this is so the booster pump doesn't run everytime somebody turns on a tap.
4 gallong per minute is lots of water with any storage at all.
PS> to clarify that is 4 houses on one well, and two of the four houses have lots of livestock.