How to Drill a Well:
If your cottage isn’t in a populated area then it more than likely won’t be on a shared water scheme. If this is the case then you create your own water supply and unless you can find a natural spring on your site you will need to drill a well.
I’ve heard of cases where people hire a water diviner but in my case I rang a nice man in Kells who came out and did the job for me. I had to select what a thought was a suitable area for the well to be drilled – in the end, we chose an area in front of the house. This was partly because of access. The truck that they use is very long and needs to be able to access the site. They basically then drill a hole in the ground until they reach water. I was given a quotation and was told that this was the average. Sometimes however it takes them longer to reach water so this will increase the cost.
You get a price for rock drilling and a different one for gravel or sand drilling. The gravel or sand drilling will be more expensive as its not as stable and additional steel casing will be required the length of the hole to support it. With stone/rock, the hold can be drilled and …Sometimes plastic casing is also required. Apparently gravel or sand drilling is the more likely of the two. In my case, the drilling took longer than the average – an average depth would be 130ft. It was quite funny as I had this guy on a big drilling machine, ringing me every so often to let me know that he still hadn’t reached water and giving me the depth that he was at. Ironic that he couldn’t find water and he in Leitrim! I started to panic thinking of the additional cost I was incurring with every few inches he drilled, but not long after I got a call to say we’d reach water and it was gushing out at what was apparently a very impressive force. You’d swear I’d hit oil I was so pleased!
Putting the pump in.
So once the well is drilled and you’ve found water, you need to put a pump in to actually pump the water up from the well. Instructions are as follows:
- Dig a man hole about 3ft x 3ft square and about 2ft deep around the top of the well.
- Dig a trench – about 1.5ft wide x 2 ft deep from the top of the well to where the tank is going (try to make this as straight as possible as this simplifies things and makes it cheaper).
- You need a pump house ie a casing or structure to house the pump itself – its an electrical applicance so needs to be protected from the elements. It needs to have a hole big enough to fit at the base for cable etc to be fed through and it needs an electricity supply.
- You need to measure the distance from the top of the well to the location of the pump – this is measuring for the cable and fittings that are needed.
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