Water Well Dowsing (a personal experience)

[Yeggster]

How to we read a glowing report for the Dowsing "Industry"? Just good Luck? Did they have a"natural ability" to find water that manifests itself with the "Y" shaped apple wood stick? or are they all just magic?

WHAT is their paranormal SECRET??

Some years ago we were building a new house in a small town with no "city" water supply ... a well for potable water was of course needed.

Working against us were several factors, we were a family of 4 used to an unlimited water supply, a small 1.5 acre lot with rocky limestone 3 feet under the surface, requirements to have the well UP hill and far away from the septic system, and ALL our neighbours had poor wells that ran dry most summers.

Long story short the contractor I choose, required a "Well Witcher" at an additional cost of $25, the well, after it was completed had HUGE volumes of water and is to this day the envy of the neighbours, it in fact is supplying two homes now (we have long since moved away)

Now for the details .... Our neighbours all had "Drilled Wells" (for those not familiar with well digging techniques) that style of well consist of a hole 8" to 10" in diameter that is pounded through the limestone with a drill rig that comes on a huge truck, it takes 2 or 3 days and is cost effective. (read the cheapest way to do the job)

Knowing my families bent on using huge volumes of water, I hired a local contractor to dig a hole 15 FEET in diameter through the layers of limestone.

The procedure entails him drilling a dozen 2" holes with a jack hammer 4 or 5 feet deep after exposing the stone, loading the holes with dynamite and filling the hole back in with sand, then blasting the rock, then digging it all out again, repeat as needed until the hole fills with water, (in this case 35 feet or so)... the blasting tends to open up fissures in the rock several meters from the hole as the layers of lime stone actually lift slightly during the blast ...

... then when it's all done, 3 foot diameter concrete well tiles are stacked in the hole up to above ground level, and bottom of the hole was filled in with limestone pea gravel to hold what amounts to a small under ground LAKE of water, the rest of the hole filled with regular sand and topped of with clay below the top soil to seal against surface water.

This cost many thousands of dollars more than a drilled well of course, but to me it was worth it ... the $25 for the "Well Witcher" to choose a spot where they would start digging, was such a small percentage I had no problem letting them do that ... especially since there was only a small corner of the lot where the well could go anyway.

So it seems the application of large volumes CASH is the real secret to getting a good water well here ... (and I don't mean the $25 either) :) ...

... nothing magic about it, unless you count my paranormal ability to negotiate a decent mortgage rate :)

[jasonpatterson]

Wow, your well only had to be 35 feet deep to fill? Perhaps your neighbors just didn't drill deep enough. My well is 185 feet and it's far from the deepest in the neighborhood. (One neighbor has a 350' well, as I recall.)

[Subduction Zone]

Yeggsters well took advantage of the fact that the flow rate into the well is dependent on the surface area that is exposed to the aquifer. He had more than 6 square feet of exposure to the aquifer, and that is assuming that flow is only coming in from the bottom. If you have a 10 inch well and the sides are sealed by a liner you have less than on the order of half a square foot of surface area. That surface limestone may not have been the best of aquifers but he had a huge surface area that he was tapping. To get water of some sort all you have to do is to get below the water table, that can be fairly low, in fact it can be at the surface. I grew up on a farm that had natural springs in a couple of cow pastures that were used as supplemental sources of water for the cattle. The flow was not huge, but it was noticeable far less than what you would use steady state in a house, but it would fill a small ground level pool for the cows.

[Yeggster]

Wow, your well only had to be 35 feet deep to fill? Perhaps your neighbors just didn't drill deep enough. My well is 185 feet and it's far from the deepest in the neighborhood. (One neighbor has a 350' well, as I recall.)

Some of the nieghbours were down 100 feet in the area.

One thing with about a shallow well though is it can be prone to infitration of surface water ... we used a good filter for drinking and tested the water twice a year just incase and had no trouble.

[MRC_Hans]

At the top of the opening post, you ask some questions, but I think you answer them yourself. You got a better well than the neighbors, because you use a better (and much more expensive) technique. You made a large-diameter hole in the lime-stone, which is a proven way to get better flow in all kinds of wells. The method is also used in some oil-wells: You drill a hole down to the oil pocket, then make a cavity with explosives.

Comparing depths of wells simply tels you the depth to the various aquifers in the area, since everybody will drill/dig till they get water, and not much deeper.

So the money you spent on the dowser was wasted, but the money you spent on an expensive technique was not.

Hans