Water Wells

A water well is a structure or excavation in the ground that is made for the purpose of retrieving water from beneath the surface. Water wells can be made in a variety of different ways, including driving, boring, digging, or drilling into under ground water reservoirs.

The water is usually drawn out of the underground well by use of an electric pump. However, it can also be brought up by buckets that are either raised by hand or mechanically.

Some wells are extremely deep, while others are more shallow. The depth of the well usually depends on how deep under ground the water is, but it can also depend on what the well is going to be used for.

A lot of well water has a higher mineral content than surface water. For this reason, a lot of underground well water needs to either be filtered or softened with a water-softener. In older days, wells were dug by hand, and the water was retrieved via bucket.

However, in more recent times, more wells have been drilled and lined with pipe (and utilize pitless well adapters) than they used to be.  Hand dug wells are usually lined with brick or stone, but in some cases they are lined with concrete.

Hand dug wells were very popular in more rural communities for several reasons. For one, hand dug wells are very cheap, and have very low operating costs. In fact, hand dug wells have been successfully excavated to almost 60 M. These wells need to be wide enough to accommodate the people digging them, so they are usually a lot wider than drilled wells.

Drilled wells are a lot more expensive, but they can also be more safely drilled to much deeper levels. Unlike in hand dug wells, there is not a way for the soil or rocks to collapse on workers in a drilled well.