In the article An outdoor shower and drip irrigation at the country home I started making a drip irrigation system supplied from a tank that I planned to fill from the river next to the plot. However, I found that in a hot summer the water level can drop very significantly. So we decided to drill a well, dig a pit at least 1.9 metres deep (in case I ever needed to turn the country home into a permanent home , so that the pit would not have to be rebuilt), install a pump station and set up automatic drip irrigation.
We called a number from an advertisement for Well drilling, and made arrangements. The workers asked me not to photograph the drilling itself, so I am posting only a few photos of the preparations for drilling the well.
The photo below shows the pipe through which drilling takes place, the pipes themselves, and the trough holding the water. A pump forces this water through the pipes to wash out the soil, which then flows back into the trough.
The photo below shows the white polypropylene filter that was fastened to the pipe and then lowered to a depth of 15 metres. That is the depth of the water-bearing sand layer on my plot:
The well has been drilled. We cover the end of the pipe to keep debris out:
Digging a pit around the well to install the pump station
We lay a level footing for the wall out of red brick:
I had enough red brick for a third of the pit, so I laid it in cement-and-sand mortar:
I built the rest of the walls with sand-lime bricks laid on edge, as I also had those available. The soil around the pit is loam and was very hard to dig. The pit is dry, so the sand-lime bricks have performed satisfactorily as underground walls:
At the top of the walls, I laid the bricks flat rather than on edge:
We made an inner frame for the lid from steel angles and channel sections, welding them at the corners to embedded reinforcement so the lid could not be removed quietly. For the frame and lid, we also used the materials we had available:
I painted the well-pit lid blue because I also had some blue paint in stock. We installed a pipe for connecting the hose and a tall pipe to bring electricity in from the house:
We finished the well pit and brought in electricity to connect the pump station. We also welded a nut to a piece of reinforcing bar. I wound copper wire around a bolt and screwed it into the nut, then drove the reinforcing bar into a corner of the pit to earth the pump station.
In the next article, we will connect the pump station and the automatic drip-irrigation controls, then lay out the pipes and drippers around the vegetable garden: DIY drip irrigation at the country home
This was Sergey Lazarenko.
Let us take a short break and watch a short video:
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