About Residential Water Wells
This video series is about water wells and how they work. This video will discuss reasons you might need a water well, different types of wells, the water table, and some other information about components in your house. This is a brief overview of topics, and you should contact your home inspector if you have any additional questions.
Residential water wells use a submersible water pump to pump water from a water table under the ground into your home. The pump is often hundreds of feet below the ground and is completely submerged under the water.
Before the pitless adapter a large hole would have to be dug any time a repair to your water well had to be made. This adapter allows the well pump to be disconnected from the supply line without needing to dig a pit. As the name suggests, pitless means that pits no longer need to be dug for repairs to take place.
Every residential water well needs power to be sent to the pump. The water well uses a submersible water pump that uses electrical power to rotate the impellers. Wells will have a manual shut off, but most modern wells also have an automatic controller that will shut off power to the well if it senses an issue.
Plumbing a water well has to be done correctly to prevent short cycling the well pump. If the well does not have a pressure switch, pressure tank, and pressure gauge, it is safe to say that the well was not properly plumbed.
Different types of pressure tanks for a well have different benifits and uses. Pressure tanks are used to prevent short cycling of the water pump in the well. These tanks compress air and the pressure from the compressed air is released as the water valve is opened allowing water to flow without turning on the the well pump.
Conditioning well water is sometimes needed when your water has high levels of sediment, hard water, or other issues that would require additional filtering or conditioning.
What does it mean that your water well failed? Are there solutions that can be used when when a water well fails? Well failure is more common than you might think in our area and the amount of water in your well can fluctuate dramatically from season to season.
Testing a water well can many many different things to different people. Does the test measure how much water is coming back into the well, how much water is being pushed out of the pump, the amount of water being pushed out of the plumbing system, or the amount of electrical draw on the water well's pump?
Depending on the type of test you got, the water well test result may be very important or relatively useless. If the well is tested to determine the amount of water that can come back into the well, but it isn't tested to determine how much water can make it to the house, does the test actually matter?