Bunnylady
Herd Master
How deep is your water table?
And did I miss how/why the last one failed?
Oh, boy ... .
Being close to the coast, we have a "perched" water table that is only a couple of feet below the surface. That, of course, is "surface water;" can't use that for a residence (too easily contaminated).
We have two aquifers that are reasonably close to the surface here, the Castle Hayne Aquifer and the Pee Dee Aquifer. The Castle Hayne Aquifer is so close to the surface and has historically had such good pressure, it has supplied an artesian well downtown for decades. Originally, our well had a static level 12 ft below the surface. A few years ago, the county drilled a number of wells in the woods behind our house for the county-wide system, and when they started pumping, it dropped our well's static level below 25 feet, and our well ran dry. Fortunately, our plumber could re-rig for a deep set up, so we had water again. About 5 years ago, that well's casing became so porous and rusty (we have highly organic and very acid soil), we had to replace the well, and the fly-by-night operation that we hired left us with no end of problems. It wasn't long before the foot valve failed, so every time the power went off to the pump, it lost the prime. One of the most frequent causes of power loss was tripping the circuit breaker, which might happen once in 6 months or 3 times in the same day. At some point, I started noticing that the water sometimes looked a bit milky, and would see a whitish sediment on the bottom of the water troughs. There's more, lots more, but most recently, though the pump was running constantly, it couldn't create enough pressure to shut the switch off. When we finally got the plumber out here to fix it, he discovered that the little gadget at the bottom of the deep-well set up had a hole in it, but even with that fixed, and the pump working perfectly, the well could only produce 3 to 4 gallons per minute. So he said, "dude, you need a new well."
Because we are close to the coast, well water is considerably less than the best. Our water softener gets most of it, but there is iron, sulfur, and lime in the water (the porous rock layer is limestone, and yes, there are lots of little caves down there). Sometimes, during drought or conditions of heavy usage, the wells at the beach get salty; it's possible that at some point in the future, our water may no longer be drinkable, too. But for right now, we have water again.
