Hand Pump Well , off-grid, self-reliant water, everything you need to know

How are you all doing? My name is Dave Whipple and you are watching Bush Radical earlier this summer. I recorded a video driving a

hand

pump

on our remote property in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. If you haven't seen that video yet, the link is in the description of this video for that video, I have hundreds of questions about how to

hand

le a manual

pump

well

and in this video I'm going to answer them all. Stay tuned for starters, all the gear you see here comes from Menards. If you're in the Midwest, Menards is like a low point or a Home Depot, I think Ace Hardware also sells basically

everything

you see here to start with, you'll

need

a hand pump.

This pump is made by a company called Water Source. this pump costs about 47 at menards it is made overseas it is all cast iron it works fine but you can get better quality if you buy an old american pump now here you have the same pump but this is an old hand pump made in the usa that came from a flea market, all the guts inside this bomb are exactly the same as the new bomb. The biggest difference you will find is that on these older American pumps, the orifice is the area inside this cylinder. Older jackets will have a smoother hole. which could make your pump leather seals last longer, you will also

need

well

tubing, you have two options, you have two inch tubing or inch and a quarter tubing, this is all inch and a quarter tubing, all the hand pumps I have seen.

It has a 1/4 inch thread on the bottom, as you can see this pipe indicates that it is a drive well pipe, it is a heavy duty 1/4 inch pipe and is built to resist being driven into the ground. with a well screwdriver or sledgehammer a question I get asked a lot is how deep can a well be with a hand pump how high will it lift the

water

now the best explanation is there on the box the claim is that it will lift 25 feet and it shows that there is 25 feet from the top of the transmission point to the bottom joint of your well.

Will the pump really draw

water

25 feet? I don't

know

, but that's the statement. This is an old technology. Surface mount pumps can only suck water. a certain distance and then it becomes physically impossible. I don't think you can expect it to do more than that so if your water is deeper than 25 feet you may have to use a different style of pump now this type here is what I get the most questions about this is the well discharge point. If you look at the pump package, it shows the delivery point at the bottom of the well pipe.

What is this? a three foot section of steel pipe and is filled with holes internally so that water can enter inside this pipe. It also now has a heavy cast iron tip so it can basically stick into the ground like a giant nail when you get it right. Up close you can see that there is a stainless steel sleeve that goes over the pipe and between the sleeve and the pipe it

self

is a fine mesh mesh. This fine mesh keeps sand particles out of the water. The perforated stainless steel sleeve holds the screen in place when it comes to a well driving point, you can get a three or four foot one.

I don't have a preference. Get what you can find in a standard pump installation. Drive the pipe down until its point is one. foot at least below your water table and you can verify that with a tape measure on the box diagram it shows the water table right here at its highest point, right at the top of the driving point, what you want is a foot of water at least above the driving point, if you don't get this driving point at least a foot below the level of the water underground, you risk sucking air into the point, which will cause all the water to fall again down the column, for example. you have a three foot spike, place the tape measure inside the pipe and once you hear it splash into the water you will

know

where the water is.

If you have a three foot toe, you'll want to be able to grab the tape and put it on. four feet further down that pipe before you get to the bottom of the point, that way you know you're three feet into the point and you're one foot above the point, this particular unit is three feet and costs about forty dollars. Now when it comes to pipes what you probably want the most is five foot sections, get four or five five foot sections, you can always take back what you don't use and then get a three foot section or a two foot section. or an 18 inch section that way, when you're driving the pipe into the ground, once you've hit the water and you have a foot of water above the driving point, you can stick anything else on top of the pipeline.

To get your well pumping to approximately the right height you want, you can also go ahead and figure that you're going to pay about five dollars a foot for your well tubing and about ten dollars a piece for the couplings you're going to want to buy six or seven transmission couplers now this is a transmission coupler it is just a joint between two pipes the only difference between a transmission coupling and a normal pipe coupling is that it is made of steel this is a standard pipe coupling and it is made of cast iron now cast iron is easier to break a cast iron coupler like this is not going to withstand the abuse that a pipe coupler needs to be hammered into the ground, they are both next to each other you will notice the momentum The coupler It has a much longer set of threads.

These cost about four dollars a piece, but they're not going to do it. They're closer to nine or ten dollars, but this is what you need right now. This is a one and a quarter inch ball valve you want. Threaded ball valve that has threads on both sides and quarter inch ball valve threads on both ends. This is about 25 parts, but it's definitely worth it and I'll explain more about that in a minute and then you'll want an inch. and a quarter pipe nozzle about four inches long, in these pictures here you are seeing that we are using a homemade well driller.

This well drill weighs about 90 pounds and will hit the well with about an inch of travel when going through good, clean sand, if you don't have a well controller your other option is what is called a drive cap. Now a drive cap is a heavy duty cast iron cap and is intended to be placed on the top piece of the well pipe. You would take this one. cap and tap it with a mallet to drive the well in once the well is deep enough, I would remove the cap, install a drive coupler with pipe sealant, install a new piece of pipe on top, say a three foot piece or five feet also with pipe sealant, you would tighten as much as you can with two pipe wrenches and then on the new pipe you would put the transmission cover back on and now you are ready to start tapping again.

Like the transmission couplers, the transmission cover costs about ten dollars for an inch and a quarter, probably half as much for the two inch version. I can't recommend a two inch one. Well, I've never driven. Common sense would tell me that it is more difficult. drive over an inch and a quarter and if this was just a hand pump well I would stay away from the two inch stuff people asked about that homemade driver and where they can get one unfortunately you can't get one it's homemade if you want one, you can make it your

self

, maybe go to a junkyard, look for the best looking materials, take them to a welder, which is not a piece of equipment that is commercially available, when you are pumping this handle, this cup of leather goes up and down. into the hole of the pump and it sucks the water up and then when you push the handle down the valve at the bottom that little leather valve closes and the water that's in the column forces this little weight up from this way and it comes out that space here and it fills this column over the plunger and it comes out the top of the well.

It is a very, very simple device. When your leather cup wears out, you simply take it apart and put another one inside. It's very, very easy. operation, you can put a new leather on the pump and you are ready to go. The same goes for the lower leather. This leather acts as a check valve, it will wear over time and dry rot and simply remove the bottom of the pump. you take off this little weight, which is just a screw, the machine screw goes through the weight, you put the little weight on a new leather, you put the new leather where it goes and then you screw the pump back on, very, very simple, old technology, very easy to work with anyone.

You can take this apart and anyone can put it back together when your leathers stop working or get crusty, cracked and dry rotted from sitting around over the winter with nothing on them. You can buy a new set of salon leathers for around nine dollars in my own personal experience this brand is water fountain this particular brand of salon leathers the bottom leather has a very narrow section that connects the outer ring to the seal area interior and it's also quite thin if you look at the picture you can see that little connection between the outside and inside of the leather is extremely wide.

All antique leathers were made this way with a very, very broad connection. This one has a very tight connection that will allow you to move now, obviously these work or they would change. the design, but in the well we put in this leather it failed immediately because it became off-center and allowed water to pass through. This looks better than the leather that came from the original bomb where it failed, but it is not visible. like the leather in the picture which of course would have no problem floating from side to side because of that really wide connection.

Look down inside this new pump, you can see that weight and it's sitting on a leather check valve like the old one. style pump and here you can see the innards of the pump on a new pump, it is exactly the same operation, there is that weight that is lifted to let the water pass through the plunger, here is the leather plunger that will suck the water up and down into the new pump. It has the same leather check valve on the bottom with a little weight on top. The technology is exactly the same. Now many people ask about how to prime a well.

What the well pump needs to work is that it needs water inside the pump. I would take a gallon jug of water and fill the inside of the pump. I would generally give it 15 minutes to give the leather, cup leather, and check valve leather a chance to absorb that water and swell, then make sure the well is full. and you put your hand in front of the pump so that the water doesn't spill out and you just start pumping and what that will do is that water will start to rise up the column little by little after I don't know 30 seconds. once the water column is full it will start coming out the top and at that point the pump will be primed meaning the top of the jar is full of water and the water column below to the point of impulsion. is full of water, the plunger goes down to the bottom, lifts the entire water column a little and the water spills out of the pipe.

What will happen is that over time the water will leak a little past the leather check valve. a while and it will lose its prime, which means all the water in the pipe will fall back to the water table and then you will have to fill the jug pump again and you will have to prime the well again. You can avoid this with the valve we talked about and a standard installation. Once you have that pipe where you're okay, you have the water you want, you would put your pump on top of the pipe if you want. so you never have to prime it again, take that pipe, lower it about six inches or so, put the threaded ball valve on top, put a three or four inch threaded nipple on top of the ball valve, of course, this is all doped with pipe. and then put your pump on top of that, what this will allow you to do is prime your pump until the water comes out of the pump and there's water all the way up the column and then here on your ball valve you can block that.

Ball valve Once the ball valve is closed, the water will not leak into the column when you want to use the pump, just open the ball valve and start pumping the handle and the water will come out when you are done pumping. ball valve with the addition of a 25 valve, you will never have to prime the pump again. Now let's talk about pipe sealant. Many people have asked me about using Teflon tape. I've done quite a bit of plumbing work and Teflon tape never bothers me, except maybe with installing a shower head. I generally always use this excellent white pipe joint compound.

I have never had this type of drug leak from the pipes. It always works, easy to use, non-toxic, which is of the utmost importance for anything that is drinking water now when it comes to using this dope composite pipe joint for pipes,make sure you stir it really well and it's just white. I think it's a Teflon-based paste, but the application itself is quite important. It goes all the way down to the threads of the pipe you're coating, you don't just want to put it like this as far as you can see the gaps, you want to work all the way down the threads, like this.

Also a subscriber told me I don't know if this is true, but I would follow this advice. The subscriber told me not to put pipe dope in the first two threads or you will taste it for a long time in the water. I think it's good advice. I would stay away from those first two topics because the well we drove had a pipe dope taste for a long time. I was probably too liberal with my pipe dope application. They probably squeezed me a little bit. the well itself and although it is not toxic, you don't want to taste anything but water in your well, so I would follow that advice and stay back a little bit, but make sure

everything

is very well covered all the way down to the threads.

If you are going to use a homemade socket driver, you will ruin one of these transmission couplings. you want to take the transmission coupling that's going to be ruined and that's the one you're always hitting when you put on an extra piece of pipe, you take that coupling off, you put on a new coupling, your extra piece of pipe and then you put the hit one on the part top where you're actually going to hit it if you're using a drive cap and a mallet you don't have to worry because you can get as many of these as the job requires if you're going to use a homemade well screwdriver you're going to hit a coupling on yes you're going to need an extra one here's a little nugget of wisdom take the cap off one of your pieces of pipe go wash your hands and make sure they are nice and clean now carefully rub your finger on the inside of this pipe it might there will be burrs and of course these threads where they were cut, that's very sharp, be careful, rub your finger inside that pipe, now test with your finger if there is any kind of oil residue or wax residue or anything whatever obviously like wow, that's horrible.

I'll clean the inside of your pipes, get yourself a small brush like this one, it might be a bit clever to put it on. Put it on a five foot piece of rod or a piece of pex or something and take some hot soapy water and brush the inside of that pipe. When Brooke and I initially installed our well with our friend Scott, it tasted really bad. It wasn't the water, it wasn't the oil inside the pipe either, it was the taste of the pipe compound, to which perhaps I put too much or it is very possible that it was the cutting oil that remains on these threads once they cut the The threads have an oily residue from the machine cutting the threads.

By taking a bucket of hot soapy water and a stiff brush and cleaning those threads very well before doping the pipe and putting the couplings together, you can eliminate the possibility that you're going to test the cutting fluid used to cut these threads by staying a little away from the edge when you apply the pipe dope. Hopefully, you won't try the pipe dope. There is some flavor inside and you clean the inside of the pipe, if you can eliminate those three things, you should have great tasting water right from the start. When I posted the video on how to drill the well, one of the most frequently asked questions was how did we know where to drill? for water, where to drive the well in this particular case in the upper peninsula of Michigan, we were on a small high mound of land and there is a swamp around us, all the ground is sand, everything is about 10 feet above grade groundwater and there is good water everywhere all we had to do was drill down there was no way we couldn't find water that's not the case everywhere some people talk about using divining rods or having someone go out and look for the water, I don't know anything about that world, it's not something I've had to do.

I don't have any experience in it. I'm afraid I can't answer that question. I have a cousin in the area. He said the water is 10 or 12 feet down and it's good water and it's everywhere when we put the well we just picked a spot and went down and we knew we were about 15 feet above the water table where we were located and that wherever down we are I'm going to touch the water, another question I get asked all the time is how do we keep the well from freezing? If you install your well pump with a ball valve like this, check as soon as you finish using it if there are freezing temperatures. you open the ball valve and let the water drain you would do this by opening the valve and then lifting the handle all the way up on the pump when you lift the handle all the way up on the pump and letting it down it will open that bottom part. leather check valve and let the water go back into the column if it's going to be below freezing at night be sure to go outside open that valve and let the prime go down by lifting the handle all the way up now when the water freezes , it expands with an incredible amount of pressure, everything in this system would break underground just a little, probably nothing will freeze, so if you leave the pump primed, it freezes a lot, your pump will probably break the first section of the pipeline. it would probably break and you would be at a point where you would have to remove a piece of pipe, change the pump, change the ball valve, change that piece of pipe, you would probably be back in business, it wouldn't freeze as much. underground until mid-winter and at that point you probably won't be using the hand pump anyway.

Another question I have is: can you take out the well? Let's say you drive well downhill and hit a big rock, yeah. You can pull it back, throw it as straight as possible and it will be difficult or not so difficult depending on your terrain, mainly once you place a pit for the first time you can still turn the entire pit by hand. The point in the well is larger than the diameter of the pipe, it will leave you a little wiggle room and you will probably be able to get it out. You may have to build a tripod and put a pulley on it to really get the right amount of force up and then take it apart, start driving it somewhere else or if you drive one down and it doesn't touch the water, you can pick it up again, take it apart section by section, try somewhere else, but once you do.

It hit the water and the well has been in for a year and a half or so. I've heard it's much harder, all the soil has had a chance to settle around the point around each of these couplings that are going to be glued. everything is going to grab that dirt and it's going to be difficult to get the pipe back out of the ground after it's been there for a while, well there they go when it comes to boosting a well with a hand pump, that's basically all they need. to know or at least everything I know that I could convey to you, I want to especially thank Scott Harriman, he taught me how to know Wells and how the whole operation works.

I want to thank Scott in this video if you like this video but need more information and want to see the process done from start to finish, click the link here on the final screen and it will take you to the original video where you will see a start to finish installation end. a hand pump well, thanks for watching bush radical, be radical, hey, see you soon.