I would not trust the style well you are currently using to handle my personal geothermal system, or trust the water quality for my drinking purposes either since they are open to the atmosphere and have NO true seals on them from contamination! That is why that style of well is nowadays illegal to construct. I would highly recommend you move onto a closed loop or construct a new pump/dump system with more reliable wells. You will be much more satisfied later knowing you have a reliable system, then finding out the hard way your experiment with a dug well failed after performing all the work to it. Dan
Definitly went with a submersible pump years ago. We also have it tested frequently. I have often worried about bateria and stuff getting in the top. Heck I find black widows under the top every time I open the top in the summer. I dont want that in my drinking water LOL. As of right now it will take very little work to try using the well. I am not going to put too much work into it. From reading what you wrote it makes me think the best case scenario would be an excuse to dig a deeper well later. Sounds like I probably should. What part of Va do you do and what is the price point for a normal well that would work for a 2-4 tons of geo?
Sorry, but I do not cover VA, I'm from NJ. Waterpirate can help you in VA. Pricing is figured out by depth of the drilled.
Yeh, wasnt sure if it would be different depth for drinking. Most everyone around here has replaced their shallow wells with something around 300 feet. I guess it probably is different from well to well also and what the underground water level looks like.
Sounds like the well issue is taken care of, I would at least get a price of the well and an idea of if it would support a GSHP. Mark
I would assume a well would be within a few ft of your neighbors 300' well. It's your best option. My advice is drill the new welll to eliminate any future issues with water quality/quantity. Like I mentioned before, closed loops are my first choice.
My problem here is the supply side of things and your health. This is all just loose talk on the web without data. You seem fairly DIY savvy, so I urge you to move forward with testing of your original concept, and put this to bed, win or lose. I do not serve your specific area, but a call to the local talent will provide you with some baseline capacity on the wells in your area at 300'. You will need a minimum of 2gpm per ton to run your system on raw water. You may also want to ask the method of drilling employed, is it rock or mud rotary? Call a couple of local drillers and check back, we will help you sort it out. Eric
This maybe a very temporary thing anyway. Seems as if we are getting the egg odor in our water again sooner than we normally do after well treatments. Makes me fear the amount of bacteria in the water. We dont really drink it much but it still bothers me. I might try lowering a UV bulb down about 20feet into the well as a stop gap. If I had to guess, we will probably be going deep well sooner rather than later. As soon as I get and hook up the geo unit I will give results. I also am planning on giving some water levels as soon as I get a few more things done on the addition.
The egg smell can be caused by the anode rod in your hot water tank. It is a bacterial reaction, I can not remember why. It can be solved by removing the anode rod and putting a plug in the tapping. I would run, not walk away from that well for potable use. Mark
Cold water smells too but not quite as bad... Last time they put a chlorine solution in and ran the water for a while. It fixed the smell for a while... I am really supprised the VA didn't require a deep well be dug.
So I really wanted to get a better look in my well. I didnt feel comfortable taking a long set of ladders and dropping it down as they did when they fixed a co-workers well. So, next best thing. I took a dumbell plate, my Gopro Hero2, some rope, a streamlight LED, and a M3x weaponlight and made a little rig. Sorry for the spinning but at least I get to get a look at the walls of the well. You all probably know more about what you are seeing than I do but was still cool to see. Not too worried about bacteria growth with this because I plan to drop about a galon of clorox in tonight and then let the water run for a while tomorrow. I almost wish I could get one of my IP cams and just keep it down there. I marked the rope at the bottom but I think an almost better measure is counting the seems in the concrete and the distance between them. I am going to go back out and measure. Trip to the bottom of well - YouTube Edit... Sections of pipe are 3feet tall and 3 feet round. There is roughly 3.5 sections of pipe filled with water. Looking at a little over 10 foot depth. That makes the well contain about 528 gallons of water... WOW.
I lived with a shallow well here in Ohio. The water would turn white cotton clothes orange, we did not drink the water. I hope the floaties seen in the water were stired up my the submersible. At 3 GPM per ton of heat pump, the smallest I have seen is two tons, we can empty the well in 4.4 hours. I am impressed. Thanks for sharing. Mark
Yeh I think they were just bubbles... I hope. Anyway- I did the math and 3gpm it is 180 gph which would be just under 3 hours to empty at 2 tons. Probably not the biggest deal since I am looking at about 800sft with r30 walls, R19 floor going into an insulated garage (would have loved r30 but the contractor insisted on finishing the garage portion for code reasons - they would only do r19), and R60 ceiling. The only reason I am going with a separate unit is because I am looking at the existing house having r11 walls and r20-30 ceiling on the second floor zone. The thermal dynamics are completely different. I am probably going to lay a 600 foot slinking on the outlet side and reinject into the existing well. I am fairly confident I could probably have up to a 50% bleed and not deplete the well. With a 2 ton system I do not see it running for very long with that space except when very cold or hot.
Let me take you out side of the box. Let's design now for the whole house, around the shallow well for geo and the new potable well. Lets look at what we need for the whole house and take the geo water to water. Here is what happens if we do this. We get you the tax credit for any thing that touches the geo. We can use DIY friendly delivery systems for heating and cooling. designed to be bitten off in do able chunks of labor and cash. Water does not take up huge areas of space needed to move heat with air. Water coils are available for both heating or cooling to fit into current duct work. Using a buffering tank we can use an over sized system for the addition with minimal run time, but still be able to expand to the whole house on a retro-fit. If you are interested I am sure we can do most of this by email. BTW Our daughter lives inside the beltway and VA is not that big. Any one that can take me to the bottom of his well I need to help. Mark
Edit... Sections of pipe are 3feet tall and 3 feet round. There is roughly 3.5 sections of pipe filled with water. Looking at a little over 10 foot depth. That makes the well contain about 528 gallons of water... WOW.[/QUOTE] Don't forget to factor in the motor on the pump is approx. 12-18"s depending brand. That will leave you you closer to 9' of water in well. Then you can not pump from the bottom of the well with the submersible since it will disturb the sands and silt that are easily disturbed in your video. After raising the the pump off the wells bottom at least 2-3',' that will you with about 6' of water to draw from. Now comes the next potential problem. The discharge water being introduced back into the well. It's will discharge back into the well the same time the pump is running to supply the heater, causing the well to be disturbed and stirred up. You can do the math, crunch numbers and Run scenarios all day, but I think the "real world" is going to show you the true outcome here. If you willing to take the risk, and live with the outcome. By all means jump in, but be prepared to have a back up plan in place.
I drank water from a deep ground well surrounded by artesian wells here in northern oHIo since I was 18. I've been drinking Lake Erie ever since. You're video makes the water look pretty icky. That's an unprofessional opinion on clean water . I 'm not sure if I'm better at water taste or moving BTUH with it. But yes, I drink it and know how to move BTHU with it. Drinking beer at the moment however. SC
Thanks for the replies... I plan on going forward as soon as I am ready for HVAC in the addition. Unfortunately, another well is not in the budget right now. Close loops wouldnt be to bad if it wasnt for the need for the damn QT flow center. Worst part about the QT is everything I have seen it will not support more than one unit now matter how big or small the loop is. Everywhere I initially read said 6' is the must for a closed loop depth. Then today I was reading that it is more about 12"-18" below the frost line. My frost line is 18" and the soil is very wet most of the year. This gives me a lot more options I did not know I had. A 5' trencher would likely allow me to put in a slinky loop horizontally placed and have plenty of room on my lot. Best case scenario- my plan works and 5-10 years down the line I need a deeper well for an additional unit or two. Backup plan - I can put in a closed loop setup I can somehow expand on later. Worst case scenario - I put in a relatively small loop field and have to go with a separate loop and flow center for each unit in the future. Mark - I would be very interested in hearing about the setup you are talking about. However, as of now I am on a limited budget. I wish I could put in a deeper well tomorrow. The approach you are talking about is some sort of hydronic system inside the ducts with an air mover attached? Interesting.
I am in, I have liked you from the start of your posting here. We can limp with the well, but I would go closed loop before I stirred up my drinking water. If you have enough land we can start an inground manifold for the new stuff with the ability to add the rest of the home. Out side of the box, (norm). Mark
The readon you have a ring well is that the shallow aquifer is finite. It's ability to give and or accept water was amstringed right from the beginning. They were cheap to install when the cost of mud rotary was out of reach finacially. The amount of turbidity you are going to see is going to be astronomical and the advection of the concrete to move btu's in and out of the semi saturated sands around that well are another big question mark. Keep us posted. If you get a decent result you could quit your day job and put the thousands of used ring wells to a better use! Eric
Well I came across a killer deal on a QT flow center for $200 so I think I am just going to go ahead and do the closed loop route. I will post in the closed loop once I get a little further along in system design. From what I have done so far with the geocalc tool, the actual loop needed is pretty small even with a 4 foot depth.
