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...