My pump is at 515 feet in a good aquifer. Water will always be there, but getting it up to where I can use it is a different question.
Water table is at 25 feet here, hand pump can draw all you need, all year long! Electric pump can draw and pressurize enough to blow out most R/Vs and Garden irrigation systems! The Ranch is a three way combo, a well at 600 feet, with both hand pump and electric, county water with a great big network of water supplies local, and exclusive mountain stream on the property that at minimum flow is still more then 200 CFS into two holding ponds at around 2700 acre feet squared on the large pond, and the smaller pond is about 1/3 of that! We have no real issue with getting and keeping water as long as we don't get chemmed out!
100 yards from a flood control lake, shallow well with hand pump and dc pump I use for greenhouse,24 ft deep with 6 ft of water, so far never went dry, 260 ft deep drilled well, water level is about 25 ft down, test pumped at over 30 gal min, all the test pump would do, dropped level 5 ft in 20 min, so well over 30 gal min. Neighbors 500 ft away have 600 ft deep wells that pump 2 gal a minute, so it depends if you catch a vein in the deep wells and they no longer "accept" shallow wells for a house approval. Most houses here have deep wells, no way of pumping if electric goes out and no idea of how to treat surface water. Would be total chaos in about 3 days and probably diseases in 10 days. Very few gardens, no farming, no real industrial use of water, so might muddle thru.
When the grit gets nitty, electricity is not required to pump well water. Nor are windmills or internal combustion engines. For anyone out there that might actually make a hands-on use of the knowledge, I offer the following links: Toribio Bellocq: Wave Pump and (Note: This link is updated from the original posting.) You will see (eventually) a video of water being pumped. Watch until you see that only one finger is being used to work the pendulum of the oscillator. In actuality, it only needs to be worked about once every six or eight oscillations. The pump guy is just riding the pendulum the rest of the time. It's even easier to work than it looks. The two technologies can be very advantageously combined. However, nothing will come of either if nothing actually gets built. Just talking about the possibilities will not achieve anything. Just to tease the mind: A large oscillator was built that was run by a tiny part of the output of a small waterfall. It was used to continuously generate a very impressive amount of electricity. (It's on YouTube, Look for it....!) Added note after original post: The water pumping was 1200 liters per hour from 3 meters below the ground, done with the intermittent use of one finger. That's enough water for almost any survival situation at a permanent BOL, even without the Bellocq technique for easily raising water from extreme depths.
Well at 750 ft pump set at 580 ft, 1/2 Gal / minute. Static level is to 60 ft. Storage tank is necessary but the supply is adequate so far. Electric pump is operated from solar and storage tank will last a few days in the rare event of extended cloudy weather. Even then, the pump will sometimes operate but more slowly. If the sunshine breaks through, even for fifteen minutes, enough water is pumped to refill the tank. Worst case scenario, the pump can alternatively be operated from a small portable generator supplying anywhere between 90 and 240 VAC. Dang I love that Grundfos solar pump!
We use a spring high enough on the mountain it gravity feeds down to us. 9 months out of the year, it runs so much most of it never gets to the storage tanks (two 1500 gal poly tanks). Fall, it gets down as low as 1/2gal min, but has never quit. Overflow line off the top of the tanks feeds on down to our fish ponds, chicken and cattle water. I had a well drilled as a backup, but it goes thru a mud vein, and if you run it hard, water turns muddy. We use it for garden irrigation.
Send some of it here. Got rain last night for the first time in months. It poured for about five minutes - that was it!
Weather dude is say'n we have now reached our annual average for the year, Gonna be a wet one for the records !
