Wells in northern states

In the 60's in VA we had "dug" wells perhaps 50 ft deep and 3 foot in diameter--though they might once have been constructed with a shovel at that time it was a 3 foot diameter auger mounted on a well drilling truck. The well was lined with concrete curbings that extended above ground with a large concrete cap. The plumbing entered the well below grade and the pump was in the house or some times in a pit beside the well covered by it's own curbing and cap.

At the same time in NC they were boring 8" diameter wells. I'm not sure the common depth at that time but the well casings did not extend above ground. They were capped 12-18" below grade and buried. The pump was in the house.

Since the 80's at least they're boring 250-300' 8" wells and using submersible pumps. The casings must extend up above grade level and the plumbing exits the top of the casing, makes a U turn and goes in the ground to the house. A concrete curb with cap was commonly put over the well and plumbing but now most folks have a fake fiberglass rock cover over them. Any work done on an old well now requires it be brought above ground.

When it's well below freezing for several days those pipes exiting today's wells under the rocks/curbings can freeze--happened to me once but thankfully didn't cause any damage.

How are wells constructed up north where the weather is colder longer to prevent freezing?

Pretty much the same, the water line exits the casing 8ft below grade, then the water line runs a minimum of 5ft below grade into the house.

the casing is penetrated 4' below ground, and a thingy called a "pitless adapter" is used to connect the well pipe to the line going to the pressure tank.

Much the same here with 6 inch plastic casing. To be frost free the water line is 8 feet down but the plastic casing extends a couple of feet above the ground. That is our only access to work on the submersible pump. Google search "pitless adaptor" to see it works.

On my drilled well the pipe you see is for the electric. The water pipe is well below the frost line to go into the house.

Chris, the 'plumbing' part does not go above grade on those wells. The case is usually a 6" case and it goes down to bedrock, then it's grouted on the outside to seal it. A pitless adapter is bored through the case below frost level and connected to the feed to the house. The pump is hung with pipe and a rope and the electric line which goes into the well. Better plumbers will place a standoff every ten or fifteen feet and a torque arrestor at the pump, then the electric line is extended over the top or the casing though the well cap. This makes for easy access to the pump and the electric lines should (when) a problem occurs. When done right, the pumps will last for twenty years or more with no extra service, and it's a fairly simple operation to repair one.

Usually the casing comes out of the ground. The submersible pump is hooked to a pitiless adaptor and the plumbing runs under ground to a pressure tank inside the house or barn. Mine is set up with a pump house with the pressure tank at the well. This is because I lived in a trailer and no warm place to put the pressure tank. Now that I built a house I wish it was set up with the tank in the house. Mine has frozen underground twice this winter and I just got it thawed yesterday. Its never bother like that before. I think it has to do with the concrete pad I poured under my lean to and over the waterline. Weve had some awfully cold weather to push the frost down in the ground.

Where I am in Central Ohio the water is fairly good, if you go east and south of me it's deep and not so good. My well is 8" and goes down 100ft. I hit good water at 60' but went on down for a bit of reserve.My brothers have spring water, they developed the springs and sent the water to an large cement tank, from there they use a sub-pump and send it to the house and barn, around here we are safe from frost at 3 ft.

In New York the steel well casing is usually 6" and must go down to solid rock. My well in Otsego County NY is 180 feet deep with 70 feet of casing. My well in Hamilton County - Adirondacks NY is 160 feet deep with 35 feet of casing. Both plumbed with pitless adapters and water-lines must be at least 5 feet deep, unless under a road or driveway where they need to be 6 feet deep.

I have two wells here in northern Michigan. 5" plastic casing has become the standard with a special Michigan-approved pitless adapter made for plastic pipe. My 120 foot well has 80 feet of plastic casing and the pitless and waterline is buried 6 feet deep.

Middle Tennessee 160 ft. The first 28 ft is cased in 6 in steel then in solid rock. The top is just like the above poster pump pipe exits the casing about 2 ft down then electric wire and support cable goes in the top, and yes covered by a fake rock.

Hummm, I've never seen a pitless adapter before. I found a good video on Youtube after y'all mentioned it. Thanks folks!

P.S. in the dug wells if you need to get to the water line going down the well or the foot valve at the bottom you get a ladder and stick it down the well with a pipe through the top rung to hold it then go down to where the pipe enters the well, cut it lose and bring it up.

I have a bored well that is 83 feet deep.
It has a 30 inch Galvanized casing (culvert) which extends 2 or 3 feet above ground with a lid on it.

About 8 feet below ground level, it was trenched from the well to the dwelling.

The casing was drilled to accept a Pitless Adapter at the 8 foot deep mark. The water line runs at this depth for about 120 feet to the Pressure Tank in the basement of the dwelling.

I have a Submersible Pump down at about the 75 foot mark, with 1 1/2 inch black ABS pipe (heavy wall) coming to the Pitless Adapter.
From there, lighter wall ABS pipe of the same diameter runs up to the Pressure Tank; the electrical wiring runs in the same trench.

Never any freezing problems (no heat in the well).
This is in North/Central Alberta, Canada (where we do get cold weather!).

Drilled a new well 4 years ago here, western side of Manitoba Canada, 50 degrees north, frost makes it to 4ft almost every year, and i have had lines freeze at 8ft where there is traffic over them (they are now at 12ft deep, so far so good)...

Anyway, new well (4inch) has a static level above ground(about 12 inches above surface) when not pumping (and has been pumped at 60 gallons per minute when we first drilled it), anyway, ours has a cap with the pipe and pump power cables coming out the top of the well casing, cap is sealed with a big rubber and steel plug, pipe for water then goes back into the ground next to the casing and the to the house. The pipe has a heat tape in it to keep it from freezing and one day will be in a small well shed, but currently is covered by small square bales and a tarp (which works very well but doesn't look that great).

Many others have pitless adaptors about 8 ft down for the pipe to connect to, they do go bad once in a while, but well casing still comes out the top of the ground, no one makes a pit for a well anymore here (not even sure its legal)... our old cattle yard still has a pit well with a drilled casing in it.

Don't know how to edit, so I will reply to my post with some pictures of the type of Pitless Adapter that I used.

There are other types.

Hope they load.

The old wells in our area, Central Iowa, are normally setup like this. Manhole sits close to ground level and is approximately 5ft in diameter and around 6 ft deep. It is encased with block walls or poured concrete or even precast concrete. In this section you will find all the electrical and plumbing connections and pressure tank. Then the bored well starts in here with 6 inch casing however deep to bedrock and then open walls to however deep the well is (180 plus ft.) Water pipes to the hydrants leaves at the bottom of the manhole, so there is no risk of freezing.

My manhole was cold enough to freeze one time since I have lived here, it was really cold and really windy with no snow cover one night and one of the pipes froze, I put a milkhouse heater in there for a couple hours and all was right again. I now make sure the lid is on tight before winter sets in.

Nate

I feel for you folks up in cold country. Here in South Georgia we have to bury our water lines only deep enough so as to not cut them with the lawn mower. TDF

Yes cold weather is a challenge, and it's hard for warm weather people to imagine, here in Central Ohio it's cold enough to give you a fight in the winter especially with a barn full of feeder cattle, we run heated waters and have a stand-by generator that will handle the water pump and the heaters,, but what we go through don't hold a candle to what our Northern friends have to deal with..

Not a problem. We have a 5 inch. Yes,the casing comes up above ground level,but the pipe comes out the side of the casing about 6 feet under ground. It had a submersible pump and the bladder tank is buried below the frost line. The gauge and pressure switch sit on top,but they have a system where they have antifreeze to the switch and gauge.

When I was a kid, farms were supplied with water by two methods.
1.A dug well usually no more than 30 feet deep laid up with flat stones leaving an inside diameter just large enuf for a man or boy (not too fat) to go down with a ladder to clean it out. We have a lot of them in this area and all the ones I have seen are laid up very nicely.
There is a large 5 to 6 ft square flat stone at the top with a nicely cut round hole in the center.
Over the hole some type of hand pump was situated. The one on our family farm had a "chain and log" type pump with a crank. We used this until about 1951 when I was ten at which time we dug a 5' deep ditch to the house and installed a shallow well pump.
2. A spring on the side of a hill piped down into the house and/or barn. Sometimes the pipe was buried in a shallow ditch in which case the water had to flow continually, usually into a watering trough.
I bought an old farmhouse in the 60s which had a spring about a quarter mile away in the middle of a field up the hill with a 5 ft deep ditch leading from it. This was the best water system I've ever used as there was a steady 50 PSI or so pressure at all times. Mind you, this ditch was dug by men with picks and shovels.
For the past 75 years or so all the wells in this area are drilled using 8" casing down to water producing rock or shale and use 5 ft deep pitless adaptors like the ones Hank posted pics of.
My former home had a 250 ft well which was cased the entire length but produced over 25 gpm over the top; an artesian well.
The well at my current home is 200 ft. deep but is cased only to 40 ft. It produces about 4 gpm and the water's static height is about 35' from the top. I've heard that some banks won't give a mortgage unless the well produces at least 5 gpm. The question never came up when I applied for my mortgage.
Apparently 4 gpm with that kind of reservoir is sufficient as, in addition to my wife and I, my son, his wife and three teenage daughters lived with us for a month while his modular home was being set up at his place. I think most people know how much water a teenage girl uses to shower! LOL

A few years back, I worked on a rural water project in SW SD. Well was drilled to 3,400 feet. Static pressure from Madison aquifer (excellent quality water) pushed water up to about 500 feet from surface. Multi-stage submersible pump set at 600 feet will provide 150 gpm to 85,000 gallon ground storage tank. The tank provides all needed pressure for the system. All lines buried at 7 feet to top of pipe. Provides water to about 35 taps, including pasture taps. Base rate was $70.00 per month, per tap. (Several ranches had 4-5 taps per ranch.) Cost of water based on usage was estimated at $4.50/1000 gallons of usage. (Pumping costs estimated to be about $4,000 per month.) No minimum usage gallons was included in the base rate. Average usage was estimated to be 20,000 per tap per month, primarily livestock watering, some household usage (+/- 15 households). Limited poor quality shallow water wells available in area. Shallow wells and stock dams unreliable during dry summers. There are about 120 miles of pipe lines in the system. Construction cost was about $3,100,000, well and pump were about 1/3 of cost. (My $0.02 worth. jal-SD)

Having drilled a few hundred wells in the north east and put in many pumps I thought I would answer your question.
First, the wells here must have the casing end above the ground. Most of these drilled wells are equipped with a submersible water pump that exits the casing below ground[ usually 4 feet below the surface].
Second, the pump is installed from the top of the casing and is hung on a pipe fitting called a pitless adapter which has a fitting through the casing where the water is piped into the holding tank. The pitless adapter is designed in 2 pieces, one that is fastened to the top of the pipe above the pump and the other is fastened to the casing. When the pump and the pipe are lowered into the well the two pieces of the pitless adapter fit together with a water tight seal and the pump is held on by the pipe and the adapter.
Simply, the pipe does not come out of the top of the well but 4 feet down. The pipe that you may see coming out of the well casing is the conduit for the electrical supply.

Here in mid Mn. it is about 6 feet down.

Wow, that is about as deep as I have ever heard of for water, It always intuges me as I drive around about the sub-surface formations and the water tables.

My well casing is plastic, with a pitless adapter. Our normal frost line is 4', but last winter we were down more than 5'. I "think" I had mine set down 6', and none froze up last winter.

My house is plastic casing, submersible pump, everything else in the house (NW IN). But my rental we just found out has a "flowing well". Going to do some more checking out on this in the spring. Going to see if I can put a frost free hydrant on the line straight out of the well. Wonder how many gpm I'll get?

If the well is sealed you can check it by shutting the pump off, and bleeding off the pressure. Then connect a hose, turn it on and carry it up a ladder, when it stops flowing you know the static head. The well at our house will push water up 12 feet, that is about 5 psi.

(quoted from post at 20:31:21 02/21/15) Where I am in Central Ohio the water is fairly good, if you go east and south of me it's deep and not so good. My well is 8" and goes down 100ft. I hit good water at 60' but went on down for a bit of reserve.My brothers have spring water, they developed the springs and sent the water to an large cement tank, from there they use a sub-pump and send it to the house and barn, around here we are safe from frost at 3 ft.

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Same here Tim, I'm more south central Ohio. On a new house we built in the early 90s the pit less adapter was only about 3' down with the electric in a piece of black pipe running up to the cap and down to the submersible pump. We had to go down about 175'. Strange thing, we had an awful time with cloudy water from fine sediment until my dad mowed off the casing pipe with an old Bush Hog (the brand, not a generic) on my then new-to-me 9N. It was covered in weeds, he didn't see it, but the dirt he knocked down the pipe somehow cleared it right up and we never had any issues with cloudy water after that.

Chris,Where at in VA did you live,My uncle bored hundreds of the 3ft dia wells in VA.His name was R R Runyon
jimmy