well, is a deep subject

Puns aside.

We have a well. those on wells know how glorious it is that when the power goes out, you are waterless.

It takes a decent sized generator to keep a well going, much less anything else in the house.

I heard once that there is a way to keep a well pumping using a car battery.

In case of emergency or sit x. Is there any ingenious way to keep a well going when you can't afford/ don't have a generator?

thank you for your help.

Someone's going to have to post a diagram.

What about a horse-powered Archimedes screw?

reply to post by nixie_nox


Yes, there is a way to get water from your well, its called get a hand pump, and pump it by hand.

Here is a hand pump that works great that you can buy for $25 in the USA.

www.harborfreight.com...

Wind powered and solar powered pumps are pretty common in the USA

Hand pumps are fine as long as its a shallow water pump. Any idea how long it takes to bring water up from 110 ft. by hand?

As NR mentioned, solar and wind work well. Solar better than wind from what Ive heard, but that also depends on where you are.

Check out this link, I used their information when I put one of my first wells in. Well Power

The wells in my area run pretty deep, from 180-450. Would one of those pumps work?
They are six inch casing.

[edit on 12-2-2009 by nixie_nox]

Now, say your unprepared, and you lose electricity, but your well is your only source of water, I wonder if you could build a windmill pump?

food for thought....

that would give you access if you need to relocate and there is a well on the premise, if you knew how to build one.

Out here the wells run deep 700 feet is quite common. We've got to get past the mine shafts for good water. The ranchers have windmills all over. It's a good flow and fills large cattle tanks. They simply disengage the windmill if they don't want it running all the time or want to shut it down. They work really good in spite of the depth.

We were on a trickle feed pumped from a spring. 9 homes could fill their cisterns overnight using this method. We all have cisterns for storage. When the power goes out my house pump doesn't work so no house pressure but I can get water out of the cistern quite easily. In addition we have mobile tanks that can hold 800 gallons along with our 1200 gallon cistern we would have enough water for emergency use for quite some time. We also have a 250 gallon hot tub.

Some neighbors have their own well. They pump this water into a cistern for home use. They have a low flow well and this method seems to work best for them. Before they were having to wait for the well to recover before they could pump more and had to restrict their usage considerably. They hauled water from town that first time to fill the cistern then the well was able to keep up with their daily usage. Many people around here with wells use cisterns for storage.

I feel better having that large amount of water on hand. I would think the wind mill for deep wells would work just fine. The hand pump, idk. You might check out the cost of putting in a cistern to be fed by your well keeping it full for emergencies. I think windmills might be pretty costly to buy or build. It would have to be stout to stand up to strong winds Idk about the weight of the pump it has to support but the windmills here are welded steel, pretty hefty solid structures.