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Originally posted by speedbump

I'm not much on rules, since the people who wrote them know a lot less than the drillers who have to follow them. Sounds like you are going in the right direction. As you know, you can't see what's down there until you drill down. That's what a real driller has to do. The big advantage the driller has is having the proper equipment and the knowledge. For you, it's kind of like shooting in the dark. If it were me, I would attach that screen to a piece of pipe, stick it in the hole you already have and try out that new Oasis hand pump.

Pandi (Driller1) is in your vicinity and so is Lance (Lkoops) but if it isn't in their drilling area, it may be totally different than what they are used to drilling in. And you can bet, they aren't going to stop at 10 to 20 feet.

I pounded in a bunch of 1-1/4" wells when I was a kid, but I understand they are basically illegal now. Not that I would pay any attention to that. I'm basically and outlaw anyhow.

Products and Pricing

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Originally posted by lkoops

25' of casing plus screen is minimum legal depth in the "great lake" state. Sometimes you can get a variance from the local H.D for a shallower well after proving there is nothing deeper. Sounds like your in the Travese City area? If you give us and address(county,twp,sec.#) we may be able to look up some wells nearby.

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25' of casing plus screen is minimum legal depth in the "great lake" state.

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Originally posted by Buckford

I would like to put in a shallow well with a hand pump on our property. I just purchased a wp2 Oasis pump from the shop here. I wouldn't mind some guidance on how to handle the well. I have a 2"x36 well point and some drive couplers so far. The long winded description of the property is below.

We have 20 acres in the northwest corner of the lower peninsula. We've had the land for about one year. The land is about 4 miles from Lake Michigan and varies in Elevation from 1200 to 1250 feet. Lake Michigan is at about 600 feet. The land is on a huge glacial moraine. There are about 6 or 8 parcels of privately owned land adjacent to us. They range in size from 20 to 40 acres each. Beyond that are thousands of acres of undeveloped state forest. We are deep in the woods. In the woods, there is a few inches of loamy soil with sand underneath. The property has a storage building on it with electric power. We don't have a well. Our neighbor has an 8" diameter well. The driller had to drill 650 feet deep to install it.

We noticed that we have a small spring on our property. There was always a wet spot where one of our two-tracks went through a shallow ravine. Back in late April, we started digging in a culvert so that our two-track wouldn't become rutted. We dug back some of the dead leaves and muck to find that water was seeping out of the ground. Uphill, ravine had a series of shallow pools in it. The water seeps out of the ground in a few spots. It flows into the ditch that we had dug for the culvert. In late April, we figured that it was flowing at maybe 3-4 gallons per minute. Now that it is June, the rate has slowed to 1-2 gallons per minute.

We drilled a hole where some of the water was bubbling to the surface(uphill a bit from the bottom of the ravine) using an auger type post hole digger. We were able to add sections of pipe to the auger. So far, we have gone down about 9 feet. The material is mostly sand with a little bit of gravel. It looks like there is also a bit of very fine clay in the sand. The hole fills completely with water and overflows as we drill. We can see small plumes of clear water coming into the hole. If we leave the hole for a few hours, The hole will be completely filled with clear water. You can see all the way to the bottom. We think we can continue to drill deeper without much trouble. The sides of the hole do not appear to be caving in.

We think we are hitting a shallow aquifer. I checked the water table depths at the Michigan Depart of Environmental Quality's groundwater mapping project at http://gwmap.rsgis.msu.edu/. The water table aquifer is 0 to 15 feet below the surface in the area that we are drilling in.

Also, there is a named natural flowing spring about 1.25 mile to the south of our property. It is a spot where water is gushing from the side of a hill in the woods. The water flows as a surface stream for about 300 yards to a pond where it sinks back into the ground. The flow rate is probably in the range of 300 to 800 gallons per minute. The water from this spring is excellent quality. There is no problems in drinking it. This spring is downhill from us. We think we might be tapping into this layer of sand.

My question is: how do we proceed? We would like to install a 2" sand point and a manual pump for now. This would basically be a camp well. How deep do I have to go down? I am already hitting water at the surface. We were thinking of trying to auger down as far as we can and then place the sand point in the hole and fill back in a few feet with pea gravel. We would then back fill the rest with the original sand from the hole.

It seems that some of the regular posters here have experience with shallow wells in Michigan. I have been unable to find any written regulations on minimum well depths for Michigan. Do regulations exist and are they applicable statewide?

Does anyone have any experience working on a similar well? Any comments or advice are welcome.

Thanks

Rob

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Originally posted by Buckford

What type of info is a well report? Does it contain any type of intermediate info such as(for example) "We hit water at 35(or whatever) feet, but continued drilling. Finished well is 235 feet deep"

Using the website listed above(http://gwmap.rsgis.msu.edu/), I can see that there is a well in the state forest about 1/4 mile sw of our property. We walked out to it using a GPS receiver. We found nothing there. If I give the info, can someone tell me what this was? Could this have been some sort of test well?

Thanks

Rob

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