Getting close to point of no return

The appraisal came in ok - not as high as we would have liked, but good enough to get the loan without having to cut back on anything. The loan package should be at the underwriter by Tuesday. If all goes well (we're told by the bank that it should), then we might be signing closing papers as early as Friday 5/29. Gulp - it's almost gut-check time...signing big loan papers is always fun. :)

I forgot to mention that I submitted the initial application to Puget Sound Energy (the electric company) for our power last week. This one's gonna bite: we need to bring power from the eastern road all the way up the driveway (a minimum run of about 300'). With that distance, we won't have a choice but to have an extra transformer located near the house (to step up the voltage or something after line loss? Not sure - I'm not an electrician). The application form asked you how many amps you wanted: 200, 320, 400, or "Other"(fill in a number). I'm not planning to grow pot or anything else that would require massive amounts of power, but I do plan to have a detached shop, and we are going with electric heat (natural gas is not available). The "Other" option sounded expensive, so I checked the box next to 400 amps. Long story short, this produced lots of dire warnings from PSE about the costs of such a high level of service. Also, I talked to several folks who know more than I about electricity, and they were all consistent in saying that 320 amps should be plenty even for a house+shop (even if you have large equipment in your shop, you never run more than one tool at a time, usually). So I backed it down to 320amps. Let's hope I don't regret that...

Lab results on well water are good

Boyd sent the lab results tonight - yay, we got good water! Tests passed for arsenic, nitrate, bacteria (e.g., no e-coli), and inorganic compounds (manganese, iron, etc). pH rating was 7.87, perfectly fine (pure distilled water has a pH of 7.0). Hardness rating (well one way to rate it, anyway) was 117 mg CACO3/liter, or 117 ppm. The Wikipedia site on hard water has more info on this topic than I care to digest, but it does rate 117ppm as "Soft". Sounds good to me - I don't want to have to mess with a water softener.

Here's a picture of the well, waiting patiently for someone to hook it up for good:

In other news, the bank has received the finished appraisal. "Appraisal" always sounds weird in this context, but the appraiser literally comes up with an expected value for your house-to-be based on the plans, specs, site, etc. The bank may balk at lending you money to build a house which won't be worth the loan amount once finished. So there is some concern here as to what the results are, but I don't know the details yet - hopefully tomorrow.

Some more pictures from Boyd

During the job Boyd snapped a few photos for me that I haven't yet shared, so here they are.

This is a well-used drill bit, I assume it is the one that was used during the majority of the drilling for my well:

Fixing the casing break that occured last week (looks deeper than it really is; Boyd said the break was about 30" below the surface):

Boyd getting ready to install the well screens which are (combined) 15' long. It's hard to tell in this photo but the bottom cap has been welded on. You can also see the two bands of scorch marks at the 5' and 10' points, where the well screen sections were welded together:

Well is finished

I managed to persuade my wife that watching a water well being assembled would be fun, so we made it out to the site a little after noon. Boyd already had a hole dug around the well and had the pitless adapter installed:

Then a temporary outlet line was installed:

Bentonite was placed around the pitless adapter and the well casing to help keep everything sealed, then the hole was back-filled. Next up was preparing to install the pump. This is a 500' spool of 10-gauge wire hanging in the air:

Here's all of the PVC sections with their stainless joining connectors pre-threaded on:

The chain-link connecting doodad is so they can lift the PVC section up using the hoist on the rig. Now, the PVC section is not that heavy, but it is 20' long which would be a bit of a handful if you were trying to hold it up manually. Having it hang in the air makes it easy to keep vertical while the threaded connections are being joined.

Boyd spliced the pump wires to the end of the spool wire:

Here goes the first PVC section:

The torque stop was attached, and the lower sections of wires were carefully taped to the PVC:

Down she goes! I hope I don't see this again for at least twenty years:

From there it was pretty repetitive; each section was lowered until it was about 6" or so above the top of the casing, with extra tape on the wire at the top and middle of each section. This tool was used to hold each section in place, so that a new one could be raised up and attached:

Once the pump was at the approximate right height, a temporary faucet was attached for testing the pump:

Finally the moment of truth:

We had to leave shortly after that unfortunately. Boyd called me later to let me know that he was getting 6.88 gallons per minute from the well; that's probably due to the max capacity of the pump (7gpm) not the well, but it is more than sufficient for our needs and I am quite happy with it. Boyd will be coming back on Monday to draw water samples for the laboratory (the lab requires that the sample be no older than 24 hours on submission), but otherwise the well is pretty much completed. It will now sit idle while we await approval of the bank loan and can move forward with the rest of construction...

Getting wet

We arrived at the well site on Friday slightly before Boyd showed up. First thing he did was measure the static water level in the well. It came in at ~260 feet deep! If you refer to my amateur drawing a couple of posts ago, you'll see that the top of the aquifer was around ~290 feet. The well water could only have risen to 260' if there was at least some pressure from the aquifer to push it up that high. Boyd said that this means the well is slightly artesian; most people associate "artesian well" with a well that bubbles by itself onto the ground surface, but it can also be any well that has sufficient pressure to pump water some distance toward the surface. This is another positive indicator of the quality of our well, which I am very happy about.

Next he fired up his rig to do some more well development. This is kind of a cool movie sequence:

Clearly I was standing in the wrong place. Note how well Boyd was able to hide himself behind the edge of the rig too. To be fair, he did warn us all to get off to the sides of the rig, but I was too curious for my own good. :)

Part of developing the well involves filling the well casing with water, which (by gravity) forces water from the area around the well screens back into the surrounding aquifer. By reversing the flow, then pumping the water out again, you get a flushing action which helps to clean the aquifer, and to remove more of the fine particles. Boyd has a thousand-gallon water tank for this purpose (this is his helper Robert getting ready to open the valve):

I was expecting him to use a pump, but he simply connected a hose to the tank and set it over the cone-shaped drill stem threads, then let gravity take over:

On the previous day, Boyd had put 500 gallons of water into the well casing and seemed pleased with how fast the water had flown back into the aquifer. To figure out what this really meant, I crunched some numbers. This is an 6" diameter casing, so divide that by two to get the radius, then convert it to feet by dividing by 12, then square it and multiply by pi to get the horizontal area in square feet:

6"/2 = 3"

3"/12" = .25 ft

(.25 ft) ^ 2 = .0625 ft^2

.0625 ft^2 * 3.14 = .19635 ft^2

Let's pretend the empty part of the casing is 260' high (per the static level discussion above). So, .19635 ft^2 times 260, gives us a volume measurement of 51.1 ft^3. There are 7.48 gallons of water per cubic foot, so that results in a total figure of 51.1 ft^3 * 7.48 = 382 gallons. (All figures approximate, and no warranty is expressed or implied.) So when Boyd poured in 500 gallons, this was clearly enough to overflow the casing had the aquifer not accepted the backflow. This is another positive indicator :). Anyway, while we were there on Friday he put an additional 200 gallons into the well. After that we had to leave.

Well hardware

My work buddy and I visited the well site yesterday during lunch. Boyd hadn't finished developing the well, but he did have pretty much all of the parts on hand needed to button the job up. In no particular order...

A pitless adapter made by Maas Midwest (spec sheet can be found here):

A cast-iron well cap assembly:

The well cap assembly pieces, flipped over, with the air vents indicated by little red arrows (they prevent a vacuum from forming when water is being pumped out):

The pump! This is a Franklin Electric "J-Class SandHandler" submersible pump, model #7JS1S4; it is rated at 1 horse-power, 7 gallons-per-minute, and weighs 28 pounds:

A "torque stop"; this is placed around the PVC supply pipe and is clamped in place so that the thick middle diameter section is just about touching the sides of the well casing:

A brass check valve from Flomatic:

There's also a bunch of 20' PVC pipe sections, with threaded ends, that will be connected together to form the output line from the pump, and to support the pump:

This should capture the majority of the critical hardware needed to finish the well job.