The land flowing with water

The cries and shouts of "water, need more water!" have fallen silent. Not because of a situation like Pompeii either. It is because we now have plenty of water. I used to think my teachers in school were a bit daft because they warned "don't waste water". I figured they must have not been familiar with the water cycle, and instead thought the drains emptied into outer space or something. However I realize now these teachers much have hauled water in younger years, because I now tell my children the same thing.

A sand point well is a simple thing, and it only works in some areas that have loose gravel, lots of sand, and a high water table. We have all three. You take a sand point well head, which is basically a pointed pipe with a screen on it, and hammer it in the ground. As you pound it down, you thread more pipe on top of it and keep going deeper. Eventually the point is driven into the water table, and this allows you to pump water out of it. Depths often run 10-20 feet.

Last week I was looking at the sand point well I tried installing last year. It liked to sit there and taunt me every time I walked past. We had hit water with the well, but only 4 inches of it at 13 feet. The well head seemed to be firmly lodged on a rock, and after much pounding on it I had given up. Then last week my neighbor suggested renting a jack hammer to drive it down. So I rented a post driver, a gas powered device that acts on the same principle as a jack hammer.

After pounding away for about 15 minutes, the pipe suddenly started going down into the ground. Since I had already beaten up the top of the pipe, I couldn't thread another section on it. This was solved by digging a larger hole around the pipe, which was good, because I wanted to put the pump and pipe below the frost line anyway. The well point was now in about 30 inches of water.

I dropped the pump in, and after a few minutes of experimenting, got the water pumping. It is slow-only pumping about 300 gallons a day, but that is more than we use. The water is crystal clear, much nicer than the creek water we used before. My plan is to install 2 more wells close to each other, then pump out of all three. The water is pumped into a reservoir and then the pressure pump for the cabin pumps out of that.

My neighbor also told me that the output of a sand point well goes up after you use it for some time. He must be right, because as I type this I am looking out the window and I see water running out the top of our tank. The pump is running of solar panels, and the water table is very high, so let the water run....