Hey All, First time here, hopefully you guys have some ideas to help me out! Last week I started clearing out the backyard of the house I bought about a year ago and after taking down a stone planter box I found a well. There are steel pipes running through out the yard and house that I assume were once fed by this well, but the house is now using city water. The house was built in 1885 and the well has probably been around since close to that time. No one ever told me about it during the home buying process so I don't have any information on it. When I cleared off all of the dirt/rock/brick from the man-hole cover I noticed that the well casing (the cement around the man-hole cover) was starting to deteriorate. When I opened the top of the well up I found it was about half-way full of rock and dirt that had fallen in and there's a family of Black Widows hanging out in there. The well basin (I'm referring to the area of the well that the pump sits in) looks to be about 8-10ft deep and about 4ft across. There is a ladder for access into the pump but it's covered in rock. Normally, I would say screw it and fill the well up with dirt and move on, but in my city you are not allowed to drill new wells and we live in an area that is often in drought, so having a well could add a considerable amount of value to my property. Here's my questions: How can I get about a half-ton out of the bottom of this well? Is getting down there with a shovel and a bucket going to be the best way? How can I kill the spiders without compromising the integrity of the well? Finally, since it looks like it wasn't purposefully filled in, what are the chances that it wasn't capped? I'm completely new to wells and I would love to be able to use this one for irrigation. Overall water quality isn't my biggest concern, but I don't want to destroy the viability of the well by bug bombing it.

I already have the actual dry well installed, but don't know how to connect the washer in the basement to the dry well. Do the pvc pipes have to run underground where it exits the house? I have people telling me different things.