Hey folks,

I'm new here, so I haven't scoured for my answers yet.

House is being supplied by a spring with a jet down below bringing it 200' up to the house, another jet handling home pressurization duties. When we bought the place in 2016, I asked the previous owner about the wellhead inside the basement and he just said, "don't even go there" I think he stopped using it because he was pulling more water than the aquifer could recover on.

Since it's inside the cellar, redrilling or doing major work to it isn't feasible.

It's been dormant for 20+ years. For curiosity's sake, I pulled up the lines, foot valve/ejector out of the housing. Dropped a plumb bob down there and have 25' of water after it bottoms out at 70 ft.

I'm under the assumption that the well has kind of recovered, but I could be wrong. I only want to use the water for utility purposes and take some of the load off of the spring. We had a dry summer and it got low, but we never ran out. I also want to tie it into the house and be able to switch over in the event a spring pump fails, so we can run toilets and water animals. We had a rodent chew the electrical line feeding the lower spring (that's a long story ), but we were without water for 6 days while I rectified it. And crippled.

Our spring water is filtered and runs through UV.

Picked up a convertible jet pump from Tractor Supply ( I have Goulds now, but they void the warranty unless a "certified installer" puts it on. The original Goulds convertible is from 1998 and it's been dry and unused. It spins up, but I'd guess the seals are shot. I have a J7 at the spring and a J5S in the house. It just doesn set well with me that they won't honor a warranty, and I'm going to use the Countyline stuff after reading pretty good reviews about them. And they are about 1/2 the cost.

Planning on replacing the foot valve, and I could also put a fresh ejector on it, but they look fairly simple. Should I change that as well?

I'd hate to do all this work, blast a couple of hundred gallons out of it, and have it go dry again. Do wells rebound, or does having them dormant ruin them and I'm wasting time and money?

Thoughts and advice are appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

 

Welcome to the forums.

It's not clear what you have.
A spring... well ?
Jet pump at 200' down ?

It's not typical for one pump to feed another.
A norm would be pumping the water up from a spring into a holding tank and then using a second pump to pressurize that for home use.

Can't offer much help on the well head in the basement.
You could have a high water level but no usable yield. That would be pretty much experimental.

 

The spring well is a separate setup. Shallow well jet pump near the well pushing the water 200' up to the house with a holding tank. The House pump pulls water from the holding tank and has a pressure tank of its own. Everything works pretty smoothly, nothing cycles excessively. My gauge to the tank on the left will drop to 20PSI when the house pump is pulling, but it bounces right back up. It holds at about 32PSI.

This well head in the basement is 70' deep and yes, I know I am rolling the dice on its yield. From the looks of the lines, they attempted to add length to drop the foot valve deeper. The one line used to splice was a brittle plastic, it broke and about a 14" section went sailing into the bowels of the well. I got everything else out.

When the well was decommissioned in the late 1990s, there was a houseful of people here and I'm sure they were attempting to pull a lot of water out of it. Is there a way for me to have the yield tested, or am I going to spend about the same amount of money as a $300 pump and $100 worth of hardware?

Thanks for the response.