The well on the street serves four houses separated by about a quarter of a mile. Because we had the B&B the county health inspector took a sample of water every year.   After we moved the remaining neighbors asked me to suggest how to take a sample of the well water without introducing bacteria in to the sample. Here is my answer to the neighbors.

The sample needs to be collected in a sanitary fashion.  First you need to get a collection container from the town of Boone water dept. on Deck Hill Rd.  Take the screen off the end of the kitchen faucet or any other so that there is a direct stream of water from the faucet.  Turn the cold water on and leave it run 3 to 5 minutes.  Then with a match or lighter flame the end of the faucet.  Run the water again for a few minutes to clear any soot from the end.  Then take the sample into the container you obtained from the town.  Cover the container with that supplied and take it back to the water dept to be tested.  It will take a day and cost about 10 bucks.

If it shown the water is contamination when the test is complete, have Dewey Wright folks come and chlorinate the well.  If you want to do it yourself get some pills from Dewey Wright or a gallon of chlorine bleach.  Then get some help in taking off the cover from the well.  There should be some fiber glass insulation in the well structure, remove that. There will probably be ants or a snake there also.  I would throw that old insulation away and buy a new roll; it will just fit in the well housing.  Find the top of the well casing and remove the plug that is there.   Put the pills into the casing or if you have chlorine use a funnel and pour it into the casing.  Replace the plug.

Now comes the fun part!  Go to each house and run water until you can taste the chlorine.  That will insure that the lines to the house have been sanitized.   Then run more water from the house farthest from the well till you are satisfied that all the chlorine has flushed from the well and lines to that house.  Then run water at each house to flush those lines out as well.

If you don’t trust your taster you can buy some test strips from a pool supply house to test for the chlorine or lack thereof.

When I was doing it I ran water from the faucet on my deck, overnight, to get rid of the chlorine.  Be careful not to run the well dry.  I have no idea how to do that!  Except maybe keep an eye of the flow from the faucet.  It will be ok to drink the water before the chlorine is all flushed if you don’t mind the taste.  When the chlorine is cleared from the water, retest all over again.

My son-in-law, Jim, built a cabin in the mountains of North Carolina in an area without utilities.  He found a spring about a thousand yards below the cabin.  The spring was flowing about a gallon an hour, not enough to wait for much of a drink.   Jim found a tank which he placed at the spring to collect a larger portion of water.  From that tank he could collect enough water to fill a couple gallon jugs which he would carry back to the cabin.

That tuned into work when it meant climbing back up the hill to the cabin.

In anticipation of placing a pump at the spring a water line was run from the spring to a hill above the cabin.  Another tank was placed on the hill above the cabin at the end of that line to store the water which could then flow to the cabin when it was needed.  It was planned to power the pump at the spring from a generator at the cabin.  That is until he found how much the copper wire would cost.

The project was put on hold because of the cost.

Some time later in a conversation with one of my other son-in-laws (I have three daughters) the subject of the water system for the cabin was came up.  He suggested a system he had heard of that used air pressure to pump water.

I began to ponder how that could be used to solve the water system problem at the cabin.

This is the solution I came up with and was implemented to pump water from the spring to the hill side thus to the cabin.

An old water heater, (an old hot water tank was chosen because it was cheap and it could be pressurized), was placed lower than the tank already at the spring so that it could be filled by gravity from the spring and the original tank.  We already knew could collect sufficient water to fill the hillside tank.  A flapper valve was placed between the spring tank and the old water heater (pressure tank) so that water would only flow into the pressure tank and not out of it when the tank was pressurized.  A similar flapper valve was placed in the outlet of the pressure tank which connected to the water line to the hill side tank.  This valve was to prevent the water in the hillside tank from flowing back into the pressure tank when the pressure to the pressure tank was released.

Now all that was needed was an air line from a compressor at the cabin to the pressure tank at the spring.  The air line was much less expensive than wire would have been.

When the time came to test our system we found that the old water heater tank had a leak and we lost as much water from the tank as we pumped up the hill.  But the system did pump water up the hill when the system was pressurized.  We turned the pressure off and were congratulating our selves that it worked; we heard water rush back into the pressure tank.

Jim said “What was that?”

I said “The flapper valve in the line to the hillside just failed.”

We did find an old hot water tank that had no leaks and better flapper valves to replace the original plastic ones and the system is still working.

When we first considered the system we were concerned as to the size of compressor that would be needed for the system. The calculations were simple to work out and it was determined that we needed  fifty gallons of air at about 45  pounds per square inch of pressure to pump the water a hundred feet above the spring.  Most compressors are rated by gallons at pounds per square inch of pressure.  A 50 gallon/45psi is not a large compressor.

The system works so well that Jim considered putting a flush toiled toilet in the privy, but didn’t.

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