IF YOU ARE ON A WATER WELL AND DONT HAVE A WHOLE HOUSE GENNY OR A MANUAL PUMP, GET THE PUMP 1st

bailer and pulley would be another possibility. thats my backup as of now. pump would be a good idea but will run thousands. i am at 160 ft.

I cant use a bailer and pulley, my well pipe looks about 10 inches, so you looked into it and manual pumps are expensive?

My well goes down 300 feet

10 inch bucket, 300 ft of rope, problem solved!!

I was looking at this lever pump

[link to www.survivalunlimited.com]

Your well and pipestring may be 300' deep, IE the pump is hung at 300', but what matters is what is the normal water level in the hole? Might only be 75 or 100' down. Often wells are drilled deeper not only for the extra fee involved but also to assure that you can't pump your well dry. Your string has a couple of check valve couplings installed to prevent leak-down of water from the pipe and enable the pump to not have to refill the entire string each time your pressure tank trips the activation switch.

Might consider pumping into a cistern or some kind of above ground swimming pool. Depending on water depth, you can probably hook a jack-pump inline with your water deivery line and pull water out of your well.

I have lost 2 pumps due to lightning strikes. The motors are made to be pretty tolerant, but EMP might be a problem. If you pump is under 2hp you can likely run it with a 5kw generator directly.

A pitcher pump and adapters would be a good idea and costs about $100 or less. If you have a tin-roofed barn, rig a cistern or even some rain barrels. If you do a cistern, you can run gutters to feed it. If you pump into the cistern rather than the pressure tank your pump will have less work to do as there is no 40psi resistance to overcome, but you also need about 15' of elevation drop to get a gravity feed into your home pluming lines....

I was mainly thinking about being without electric for extended periods of time like that huge blackout we had a few years ago. Plus in NY, it is common to lose power during bad winters from all the falling trees.

I am going with a whole house genny and a manual pump, I am just getting the manual pump first because I think that is pretty much failsafe.

About how much does it cost to drill and set up a hand pump?

We have the 'old well' which is currently a slab of concrete covering the 24" wide hole. It was replaced by the "new well" which was a pipe going a couple hundred feet down.

I uncovered the old well a few years ago, she has water down there. I tried the old rope and bucket drop routine, it took a few tries to get the bucket to fall upside down all the way to the bottom.

One needs to have the bucket hit the water upside down, thus you need room for the bucket to be able to turn (underwater preferred).

Hauling it up is a real pain. I had forgotten just how miserable it is to haul up water out of a well.

As for the Pump question, check out rural antique stores, there are still plenty of cast iron hand pumps out there. You most likely will have to take it apart and make your own rubberizes gaskets.

[link to antiques.lovetoknow.com] is what I'm talking about.

We have one in the shed, even have enough pipe to go back down to the water in the old well.

Other pumps you may be interested in: [link to www.become.com]

I don't know if that pump is the same one, but there was a thread awhile ago with a pump someone had bought and it worked well.

How bout some sort of windmill to power a small pump?

when the wind blows this is great and wonderful.

Actually the many fanned farm windmills you see were designed to pump water using in essence the same hand pump that was used on the house well.

Some links on the subject:

[link to www.windmills.net]

[link to www.ironmanwindmill.com]

I went a different way and have a generator, You can pump all the water you need for a day in about ten minutes.

[googlevid] [link to www.thefoodguys.com]

Last Edited by freeone on 07/01/2010 03:53 AM

Thanks for the links-