Drilling for water

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Tuesday 09 June, 2015 by Uncle Spike

Twenty-four hours a day, for seven days… that’s how long it took to drill our artesian well. Before that, we had to select a site for the well, and to do that we did a spot of water-divining, using bent old coat hangers and the outer tubing of two ballpoint pens! All laughing aside, it worked. Whilst some farms hit no water source, ours works a treat 🙂

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Our bore went down some 121 metres (395′) below the farm. The bore was 13cm (5″), with a 5cm (2″) galvanised steel bore pipe that had an 18x in-line pump at the end of it some 70 metres (228′) underground to deliver cold, fresh mountain water sourced from an underground river.

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To operate the pump requires electricity of course, and with the pump rated at 7.5kw, 3-phase light industrial cable and connection was brought in via a few poles added to the hedgerow between our neighbouring farms, and then we dug a trench across what would become our driveway to bury the cable.

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This was one of many projects going on all at the same time that summer, with hand-mixing concrete to set the electrical cabinet, burying the spare 25 metres of pump cable (for emergency usage should any decrease in the river necessitate lowering of the pump later on), and then setting up the pump station for the drip watering system.

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This all took place in July, as I recall, and I remember how much work it took to bury that cable by hand (and spade). Needless to say, I didn’t have any weight problem that summer!

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