House water well is 16 years old, 130 feet deep in Fl (sand). Filters (washer, etc) keep getting clogged. Have been advised water level is 10 feet below normal. Have also been advised to run water for 24 hours, a week, a month, to collapse the walls, and sand will stop. Can anyone verify this? Is there any alternative than having another expensive well dug? Also, any ideas to killing Palmetto bushes without harming the environment? Thanking you in advance.

-- Sand (inourw@ter.com), May 04, 2000

Answers

Hey, just been thru the same thing here! I live in North Carolina and we were experiencing the same kind of problem. Sand clogging washer and sink and pipes. our well was only 100ft deep and it was around 40 years old. It went dry on Christmas Eve, oh what a blessing lol! We had to have a new one drilled and they had to go 840ft deep to hit water. So a week later we had water after paying 4500 for the new well. We still have a lot of grit in the washer and toilet and pipes they say it will clear up in around a year but it still hasnt and its been over a year. Not much advice but good luck!!

-- Sarah (SCaswell1@excite.com), May 04, 2000.

I realize that Florida is almost a different world from Texas, but I don't think you want those walls to collapse. Around here, if the wall collapses, the sand stops all right. The whole stinking well stops!!!! If the walls collapse, it will fill in the vein the water is coming from, and you will have no water at all. Chances are good that the reason you have so much sand in the water is because the walls are already collapsing on their own.

Suggestions: 1. If well isn't cased (inside covered with pipe or tile or something) all the way down to the bottom, you might be able to stop the problem by casing it now. The well I am using had that problem when I was a kid. The well was only cased down far enough to keep surface water from washing into the well from the top and collapsing the hand dug well from the topside. My parents had a well drilling company come in and lower more tile of a smaller diameter into the well all the way to the bottom and up so that there was one tile overlap on each layer. They then used a pipe with a funnel at the end and filled the space between the two layers of tile with pea gravel. We did this by hand. It took several days of the three of us taking turns, using every spare, daylight moment to get the gravel between the layers of tile, but the sand/collapsing wall problem was solved. That was nearly 35 years ago.

2. If you already have a casing in the well, and you don't think it is going to collapse, you might try shortening the length of pipe that the foot valve for the pump is on. When the water level gets lower, the suction of the pump causes more agitation in the water and it stirs up sand, etc. from the bottom of the well. Try pulling out the foot valve, cutting the pipe off about 2 feet, re-attaching the foot valve, and reinstalling it into the well.

Good luck.

-- Green (ratdogs10@yahoo.com), May 05, 2000.

I can't speak about the sand walls collapsing, but when we bought this place, we used to get a lot of sand and debris in the water from our four-hundred-foot well. Eventually it wore out the pump, and when we replaced the pump we didn't put it so close to the bottom of the well, which solved that problem. (We also had the well hydro- fractured, as we had little better than a dry hole in the ground; now we have almost four gallons a minute -- compared to less than half a gallon/min. before. But I don't think that will help your situation any.)

-- Kathleen Sanderson (stonycft@worldpath.net), May 05, 2000.

Ask a driller about installing a liner with a screen on it.

-- jumpoff joe (jumpoff@echoweb.net), May 05, 2000.

$4500 for 840ft of well?! You got off cheap! 2 years ago I put in a 326ft well and it cost $12,000!! How many years ago was it?

-- snoozy (allen@oz.net), May 10, 2000.

Snoozy is right -- last time we had a well drilled, it was running about $30/foot -- much closer to his figure. That was in Alaska -- I figured it was high compared to lower forty-eight prices at the time, but it was twelve years ago, so lower forty-eight prices have probably gone even higher. So how did you do it, Sarah? Anybody else have any idea what wells cost per foot in their areas?

-- Kathleen Sanderson (stonycft@worldpath.net), May 10, 2000.