So, at this house we have what is considered a ‘well – pit”. This well pit constantly freezes, floods or backs up and therefor the electric goes underwater and we lose power to the pump. All in all meaning, the water stops flowing in the house on a normal basis.
The neighboring greenhouse we’ve talked about in other BLOG posts shares this well with us. Yes, imagine that electric bill. And you sure hope you're built on an underground lake right? Imagine that, sharing a well with a green house. But we’ve been lucky it's not been fully operational since we purchased the property in 2006.
The circled area is the ‘well- pit’. It has a lid you lift up and you need a ladder to climb down into all of the controls.
This is looking down into the well pit. Which we finally were able to get into. We’ve had a lot of flooding lately which did not help the situation. It's hard for a sump pump to do its job when its under water and keeps hanging up. In the above photo we’ve started chipping the concrete blocking away from the sides.
Now this is pretty awesome. In the above photos this is what they used to fill between the cinder blocks. Layers of news paper and concrete mixed together to form insulation.
Close-up of the actual well head, this being at the bottom of the pit.
I'm getting ready to attach the new well pipe now.
Pitless adapters are amazing things. This lovely item right here is allowing us to get rid of that huge, deep, scary pit taking up our yard.
Here is the in and out access to the bottom of the pit.
First I drilled holes in the floor to allow drainage then add a layer of gravel for better drainage.
Breaking out the walls.
Getting the tractor involved to make this job go faster, not to mention easier on my back!
Down comes the walls into the pit! Putting it in the pit is helpful for two reasons. First, you don’t have to find a place to dispose of the loose concrete and block. Secondly, it takes less stones and dirt that you have to purchase to fill it in.
Here we are plumbing in the well casing.
JC holding the new hydrant plumb while I go and get another load of dirt with the tractor.
Nearly filled in and have another helper.
We have to make sure everything is level or else we’ll run into problems later down the road.
Now all of the block is below grade.
Which means eventually we can smooth over this when it is pressed down enough and plant grass and instead of a huge dangerous pit, we’ll have a couple pipes coming out of the ground that we need to weed wack around.