Well Drilling Report + Time Lapse Video

Gruene Weide Campfire Fare for Working Men

For the first time in a few weeks, my brother became available to continue our well drilling operation. We made a weekend camping trip of it and as you can see from the above sundown photo, I served pork ribs and beans cooked over an open pit. Quite the manly fare for a Saturday evening. Yum! Yum! Naturally we washed down dinner with a couple of beers. I closed out the evening using my 10x binoculars to spot two of Jupiter's moons in the clear night sky.

By the way - if you cross read my health and fitness blog you'd know this food doesn't fit well within this year's eating light guidelines. But special occasions such as a campout on Gruene Weide naturally excuses a deviation from the norm.

I set up my HTC DNA with Lapse It Pro time lapse app and used it to time lapse a photo every 30 seconds while drilling Sunday Morning. The phone's battery died before it got too many photos so the resulting video runs a short and sweet 60 seconds, including the title and trailer.

Now for a well drilling recap. We started drilling the well around two years ago. During research about well drilling I found How to drill a well link which had a reasonable, achievable method to drill for ground water using a compressor drill attached to PVC and compressor hoses powered by renting heavy-duty compressor. I learned from neighbors that their well's water table stood at 19 ft., so I set my drilling goal to achieve a 40 ft. well depth.

I ordered the drill from the above link and after a few months got started. The work always requires two people and I planned to drill on weekends when I could get help from my brother, Kenny, or my wife, Inge. It has taken about two years to drill to today's 24 ft. depth due to two out of three team members not being available.  Here's a run-down of what drilling in Blackland Prairie of Milam County, Texas encountered and rough time frames including rough estimate of how many weekends involved.

1. Initial post-hole digging to 30 inch depth and other set-up like return water hole digging and PVC assembly.
2. Started drilling - descended to 5'-6" depth within two to three hours through mixed clay and sand. (Still first weekend)
3. Encountered rock - crumbly limestone embedded with flint chert, rocks, and fossils. Drill rate decreased to 1/2 inch per hour - about 4 to 6 inches per each weekend of drilling. This continued to depth of about 8 ft 4 inches. (About 2 ft, 10 inches of limestone/chert slow drilling over many weekends with lots of stops to pull rig out of hole to release rocks that jammed the bit and stops to vacuum rocks out of the hole.) It took six to eight weekends to punch through chert.
4. Rock changed from limestone/chert to siltstone. Drill descent rate increased to 8 inches per hour, resulting in weekend drill depths (about 6 to 8 hours drilling per day) of 4 to 6 feet. 
5. As of today, March 17th, the well stands at 24 ft. depth. More than half way to the goal of 40 ft depth. (3 to 4 more weekends left spread over my crew's weekend availability and continuing through faster siltstone.) We drilled through 16 ft of siltstone depth so far and the siltstone section has taken 2.5 weekends, because the first weekend we still drilled limestone/chert Saturday and broke through to the faster siltstone Sunday morning. (And it felt great to go from 1/2 inch per hour to 8 inches per hour because you could easily see the progress.)

The total drilling weekend count stands at 10 to 12 weekends to drill to depth of 24 ft. Weekend drilling achieves a bonus of halved compressor rental cost as the place I rent from closes on Sunday and as long as I get the compressor back to them before 8:30 a.m. Monday, they only charge me for one day's rental.

As a closing note, Nathaniel from Well-Tek - the company behind the How To Drill A Well link above, proved extremely helpful from the start, answering emails promptly and quickly replenishing ordered supplies (such as a new drill bit after I wore the original bit out in the limestone and siltstone.) Solid thumbs up on the whole drilling process and especially with working with him!

The drilling process requires water and in the video demonstration of the drilling process water is available from a garden hose. I don't have a nearby source for water so I tote in water using two 35 gallon tanks and water from my 330 gallon water harvest tank. With the drought we're suffering through, the latter source is about dried up. Water harvesting doesn't work if it doesn't rain, which is why I'm drilling a well.