I know this subject has been covered before.....I'm thinking about drilling a water well to keep my pond topped off. The last 3 years it has varied from 1-5 feet of the fill point. It was built to be 13 acres and now is 4 feet down and aproxiamtely 8 acres.......I really need to know what kind of flow rate range I'll need to do the job assuming there is no leaks in the dam...East Texas...thanks.

Somebody may want to check my math but figuring 1/4" evaporation loss to evaporation in 13 acres works out to about 88,250 gallons per day or roughly 61 gallons per minute flow to keep it topped off.

Wow...how does that compare to a typical water well for one house hold or even the flow rate of water main f/ the city to a house hold?

Ryan:

Your Math is the same as mine on this. 61 gpm for 1/4" per day evap loss.

It would probably be higher on hot, sunny, windy days. I know some of the Texans have reported 1/2" loss per day.

My household well will deliver 11 gpm under the best conditions. Plenty for showers, laundry, and toilets simultaneously (YoooWWW! OK, not the toilet.) but way low for irrigation/pond fill well rates.

It will take a lot of HP to pump that much water, easily 7 HP or more. Running continuously that will add up to more than $400-$500 per month.

Lakel,you can map where I am or consult locals who have wells.I put down a well and am told I was fortunate with the results.It produces about 4 gpm the last time I cked it.Ill try to ck it this weekend again if I have time.

I get 1/2 GPM so installed a 2,500 gallon tank.

What the heck is that picture of?

ceadmin, guess you missed the story. tried to find a spot on property for groundwater production to keep pond happy......ended up with a 420 foot hole that produces 2 gpm, and spits out the top...suffice it to say thats my $6k spitter........nuff said?


whole story here:
http://www.pondboss.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=94092&fpart=1

DIED...If it spits 2gpm without a pump it seems a pretty good spit at the end of the month.
2gpm x 60=120
120 x 30=3600
3600 x 12=36,720
Does it help the pond at all?
Its early,brain isnt working,better ck the math.

I ran my 2 gallon a minute well into Zephyr Pond for several months. It didn't make a dent in the level of the Pond. Zephyr was around 2 acres and 20 plus feet deep.

Heybud, that is 2880 gallons per day and it would take you 19 days to raise the level 1" if you didn't have any evaporation. You would need a pump that has a 10 GPM output to probably stay even with evaporation during the summer.

yeah unfortunately TOMG it spits at about 0.3 gpm. it would need a pump (and pump sentry) at 400 feet and auxillary storage tank (like DD1) to be useful for anything. its current use is to grow trophy sized weeds.

what is nice about it though if the power ever goes off here for an extended time i have a ready source of potable cool el dorado mineral water. maybe alligator is right, i should start bottling the stuff....DIEDs NECTAR....

I think that technically your supposed to call it "5 opm" instead of ".3 gpm".

It that metric??????

D.I.E.D...Those are organically grown GREEN plants and sell for very obsorbant prices on ebay to eco nutcases for thier cancer fighting nutrients

No, it's 5 "ounces" per minute.

Well, I guess it would be a little more than that....

128 oz = 1 gallon?

it actually changed over our "winter" and increased flow to MAYBE 60 opm. i expect to drop back to 30 to 40 opm by summer though.

edited post....how rude....there goes DIED again, hijacking threads......mr. lakel, please come back, and please excuse this digression.

ceadmin, that's a water storage tank much like mine. The submersible pump in the well pumps into it. Then out the bottom via an inline pump and in to the pressure tank. Then out of the pressure tank to the house.

Here's the deal. My well produces about 1/2 gpm or 30 gallons per hour. That's not much and we time my wifes showers by the calendar, not the clock. However, the well produces 24/7 to keep the tank topped off. Without the additional storage, my wife would be severely handicapped. I was told at the plumbing supply house that the average family uses about 273 gallons per day. I have no idea about whether number that is correct.

BTW, Lusk lives about 50 miles away and has a well that produces 100+ gpm. Doesn't sound fair.

dave in el dorado - I missed the previous thread on your water well misadventures. Did your driller ever mention fracturing your well?

I am in the oil business, and we face the same problem all the time of just missing the fractures necessary for economic production. Going in after drilling and fracturing the tight rock in your low productivity zone with hydraulic pressure is actually much easier than it sounds. The oil industry does this on tens of thousand of wells/year.

I know in some areas of the country the water well drillers have a miniaturized version of the equipment we use. If the geology is as you described, then I am very suprised some of the drillers in your area don't have the frac equipment. It is just too damn hard to try to hit that target when drilling.

Of course they get paid by the foot, so some drillers don't care if they find water. When my company drills a well, we don't get paid unless we can get something valuable back out of the well.

You know that sinking feeling you had when you were nearing $6,000 into the ground and nothing to show for it? We get that same feeling when we have about $400,000 in. Fortunately, necessity if the mother of invention. Having that kind of money going to waste has spurred a lot on innovation in the oil industry.

I am a petroleum geologist, so I am not an expert on water wells. However, if you want some more feedback, then feel free to contact me. (I have been perusing this forum for a while, and just want to say to all of the regulars -- you rock!)

A big hearty welcome to FishingRod! We're glad to have you aboard. Your input could be really valuable.

Bruce

yes, welcome to pondboss fishinrod and thanks for the kind words. that sinking feeling i know all too well, but i like to maintain that as one door closes, others do open....

you've raised an excellent point. i've heard of hydrofracturing wells but as you might have guessed, our local drillers dont offer that service. of all the drilling i have done, i have never seen the process conducted. most of my drilling work involves design and installation testing and remediation wells.

i am not sure what types of rock may be better suited for the technology if it were available. my property overlies a mid-late jurassic metavolcanic formation (Logtown Ridge Fm) that exhibits a classic weathering rind, shaley and loose from surface to 20 feet or so, then becoming extremely dense and massive the rest of the way down. secondary mineralization accounts for pyritization and silicification, so there are zones that are unbelievebly hard (drilling wise). if you hit it right, the water tends to show up in quartz filled fractures. we found 10 gpm at 180 feet in my other well where abundant quartz came up in the cuttings. this well supplies the house and irrigation, and i will not pay the power co. to use it for my pond.

thanks for providing food for thought, welcome again, start a new thread for yerself and tell us about yer pond


and hey there lakel....come on back, whats up?

I will offer some encouragement. I drilled a well and had good luck. Studied the heck out of it and was shocked to learn just how much luck you need to get a good well.
I use only to control water in my pond and ended up with well that pumps about 55 gallons a minute and I put a 5hp pump on it.
Drilled 280' at a cost including pump of about $7,500.
It is working pretty well so far and allows me to control the level of my pond. I have a 1 1/2 acre pond above another 4 acre pond and I use the well to keep the top pond at full spill all the time so any rain flows straight through. Does not seem to be enough to really move the level of the bigger pond but works really well on the top pond and it is brim full all the time.
I have been calculating the cost to run 24/7 and so far it comes to about $6.25-$7.25 a day. Worth it to me as I figure since I don't smoke or drink beer (everyday--just many days) that it is my bad habit money I blow. It can be done but you have to catch a break and get a good well with 40-60 gpm to make it work.

Fishinrod,Welcome aboard.I drilled my own well and would be interested in more info if you could find the time to elaborate.
Lakel,Im sorry but I didnt get a chance to ck the well this weekend.I had it on the agenda to get it done but ran short on time.Everything was going good till I flipped the bobcat and it went south from there.After fixing the blown hydrolic line,which happened right after I flipped it,I had to dig and remove all contaminated dirt from the scene.As if that wasnt enough fun I then proceeded to get my tractor stuck on the dam while doing repair work there.BTW,my wife said I almost went in the pond and drowned but I swear it wasnt even close.I came closer when I got the mower stuck mowing the back side of the pond than I did on the tractor........Sorry about the rambling,Ill try to get the well cked one day this week.

We can send folks to the moon but can't guarantee finding water when we drill a well (or oil I guess). Science is strange stuff.

Dave I've read that 3rd paragraph three times. The only sense that I can make of it is that you have rocks, real hard rocks.

He lost me with the jackass mental volcano.

Dave - Do you have a geology background? It sounds like you have shallow well experience.

The fact that the productive fractures are quartz-filled is good news, it means the fracture system is old. When we frac oil wells, the fractures are vertical and the azimuth (compass direction) depends on the rock stresses. California is still tectonically very active (rocks layers pushing and pulling each other). Since the stress field is different now, compared to when the old fractures formed, any new induced fractures should cross-cut the old fractures.

Instead of drilling into one fracture, theoretically you could intersect 15 fractures at 10 GPM and have a 150 GPM well. The fact that no drillers in your area perform this service, probably means I have something wrong with applying it to your situation.

The fact that the rocks are very hard to drill is not really a problem. We couldn't drill through diamond-filled fractures because the diamond is so hard it can't be abraded (cut) by our bit. However, tap your wife's big ol' diamond with a hammer and see what happens. (I take that back, don't tap her diamond with a hammer. Lunkers may be able to give pond advice that eventually leads to a divorce. Fingerlings should make sure they don't give out that kind of advice.)

There are several problems I can imagine with the fracture treatment. In oil and gas wells (deep wells) the lithostatic pressure is high so the fractures form vertically. In near-surface fracturing, the new fractures may form horizontally between the rock layers. This still may not be a problem if your natural fractures are not also horizontal.

The biggest problem I forsee is keeping the fracture "in the zone". Our oil fracture treatments are usually limited by the burst strength of our steel tubulars. Our casing is cemented into the well with high-quality cement and allowed to set for a week before fracturing. We can get plenty of pressure at the surface to fracture the oil reservoir at depth. However, if you blow out through your casing, or fracture up your cement sheath into a water zone, then you have a good chance of ruining your whole well.

There is a way to run 420' of steel tubing in your well and use a packer to keep the pressure off of your well casing during the fracture treatment. The fracture pressure will seek the easiest path. I fear that in a shallow water well, the easiest path will be back up to the surface through your grout around the casing.

I know there have been a lot of high dollar groundwater remediation projects in California. They may have fractured some shallow wells in these projects to aid in the clean-up. If you know an expert in this field, you might ask them how they performed fracturing treatments (if they did any).



Tom - I hope that answered some of your questions. If you have a more specific question ask it in this thread (if that is proper PB etiquitte).


PB Regulars - I have an unusual pond-building situation. I have all kinds of idiot schemes to make it work. I need to get out and get some more survey levels to do a better design. Then I will open a new thread so you guys can help "de-idiotfy" my plans.

Fishinrod,yes,thank you.It answered quite a bit and I understood most of it.
If you need help coming up with idiot ideas,let me know,what I cant come up with,other members here can.I havent had the pleasure of meeting them yet,but I can sure name a bunch of em

Just my 2 cents on the calculation for the gpm on the well. 1 acre, 1 foot deep has 320,000 gallons of water. If you are 5 acres down x 4' depth the formula is 5 x 4 = 20, then 20 x 320,000.
Hope this helps.
Otto

fishinrod, yer discussion of stress fields is fascinating. in my area of the sierra foothills, the predominant structural trend of faulting, paleo fracture, metamorphic foliation and cleavage (settle down JHAP) is northwest/southeast with more than one generation of cross-cutting intrusions (quartz veins). what does any of that mean for finding water, and/or attempting to drive (hyrdro) fractures in good directions? i dont have a clue.

well as i said fishinrod, food for thought. i can only imagine the wife's reaction at the cost to get another rig out here, run 420 foot of steel casing down, perform a maneuver that could either give us water, not give us water, or ruin the well... but to answer yer question, yes on the geology background. igneous petrography, geochemistry, and applied geol. (site investigation/remediation).........and BTW, lookin forward to yer "idiotific" pond plans

otto, that always amazes me......and i try not think about this anymore.....grasp the fact that 1 acre of water 1-inch deep is about 27,000 gallons, which if yer evap rate is 1-inch a day (which it can be here), and no other water supply, you would need a steady ~18 gpm well running 24/7 to keep up a 1 acre pond.

FishinRod we will definitely help any way we can! Make sure if you start the thread and I don't jump in that you find a way to get my attention, because I am the abolute KING of idiot plans!

Lakel I priced a well for just the same reason. The trinity aquafer where I have my pond is about 700 feet deep. Going that deep for that much water with a seven horse pump was going to cost around eighty thousand dollars. I think he said one of the biggest factors in the cost was the size of the steel casing needing to be eight inches. The guy that I had price it for me drills water wells for the gas companies. Needless to say I didn't do it.