OT-WELL ideas please

Now for the fun part; This well is under the kitchen floor about six feet below finished floor. At one time it had a jet pump on a concrete pad about two feet below the floor which I jack hammered all out and turn the pit into a nice little storm shelter. I welded a cap on top of the four inch casing with a one inch pipe nipple in the center. What can I do to open the slots. I thought about using a blasting cap but then 9/11 happened and I can"t find them anywhere. Note: The wife says no holes thru the roof. Thanks, Richard H.

Really not enough info to give suggestions, need static head and well depth.

I would probably use a pressure washer and hydrocrack the well. Fill the casing with water then pressure the system. This will cause fractures in the gravel/sand and or weakest point being the slots in the well casing.

T_Bone

A 4" casing with a 55ft static head will hold about 35gal. You can use a weight on a string to tell well bottom then use a float on a string to tell static head.

I've also built a small static head detector from a 9v battery, electronic buzzer and T-stat (thermostat (cheap)) wire, under $50 including wire for 250ft. Just series wire the buzzer on one lead from battery, negitive or positive don't matter, and hook the other lead to the T-stat wire. The other t-stat lead will be on the battery post. Strip the T-stat wire ends 1/2" on both drop leads with a weight on the end (plumb bob works well). When the bare leads touch water the buzzer will sound. I've used this detector to 1000ft with good results.

I would then trash pump the casing to see just how much water you can get from your test measurements. Pump into a known quanity container, 55gal drum?, and then time it, until you run out of water or pump sand/mud. That will tell you how much gpm your well will produce at that static head.

A trash pump will pump small rocks and mud without damage. You can rent them pretty cheap just make sure it can pump at the suction head depth you need.

Could be that the bottom of casing is full of mud/sand not allowing a strong static head. You can make a hand baler if this is the case if you can't pump it out. Do a google search to see how a well baler is made.

Here we can not get a wellman to mess with a unkown well hole as he's at risk of loosing eqipment. Of course our wells are 500ft plus so he has more to loose.

T_Bone

I think without getting a better idea of what the problem is, your going to be even guessing more. You can tell alot of what's happening in the well shaft with a disc on a 1/8" rope. I think you need to identifiy where the static head is in relanship to the bottom of the bore. Then a timed pump would tell you even more. I think that will give you an idea of the problem.

I would not send anything down the bore that can rotate and get hung up on the shaft wall unless that's the last best effort before giving up. This would be the same reason why a driller will not mess with a unknown bore.

Look at the problem from how the well works. You drill a bore hole down to water bearing sand & gravel, then you case the bore so sand and gravel can't run into the bore with the water flowing into the bore. The water standing in the bore, the static head, then is pumped to the surface to use while at the same time water keeps trying to refill the bore.

When you pump the bore at a rate that the water can't not keep up flowing into the bore, then you have just determined the flow rate of the well over a given time period or gpm of the well.

To keep the sand & gravel from getting into the bore, we use a perferated pipe wrapped in fine screen. In 75yrs you can imagine that the perferated pipe and screen has to be getting weak from the water eating away at it and the bore could be colasping. This disc could give you an idea if this was the problem vs using a small diameter pipe to find bottom.

Could be your aquifer that your pumping in has dropped. Comparring your new well to your old well would tell you this.

Another problem is when you drill a deep bore then set the pump shallow in the bore allowing fine silt to build in the bottom of the bore thus loosing static head. If it has been shallow pumped then this could be your problem. A homemade baler then could tell you this and also resolve the problem.

T_Bone