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Drilled Well

 
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I have a drilled well on our property- the well is 505ft in depth and the water measures within 50 ft of the top of the well. How can I determine the Gallons per Minute? Thank you!
 
pollinator
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Location: Courtrai Area, Flanders Region, Belgium Europe
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From those 2 data you cannot calculate the volume you can extract any given period.
 
pollinator
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Howdy Chris, help me to understand what you are trying to get to.


Are you just wanting to know how many GPM you can pump or how much you can pump without running the well dry?

Are you looking for the recharge rate of the well?
 
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It all depends on how much and how fast water can seep in when water is pumped out.

We got a handpump drilled (for free, by the government) 80 feet down, to the level of the Indus River just 30 feet away below the cliff. We thought we'd be able to put an electric pump down it and get as much water as we wanted, but it turned out that if we all took turns pumping by hand, we could run it dry, and then after waiting 15 minutes, we could pump it dry by hand again.

7 years later we got a separate borewell drilled at a different location in our campus, and they drilled 130 feet down, and the recharge rate is such that we have put an electric pump down there (powered by solar electricity) and it never runs dry.

Groundwater is a bit unpredictable -- that's why there's such a thing as dowsers.
 
pollinator
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If you are asking if you have enough water, the answer is probably yes.

As others have pointed out, you need to know three things with wells. Depth, the highest the water rises, and gallons per minute. Unfortunately you do not have the last part of the equation, but that is okay I think.

We know your well is 505 feet deep. Since you want to keep your pump a minimum of 5 feet off the bottom, and your water is 50 feet from the ground height, you have 450 feet of water in your well. The standard well casing has 1.5 gallons per linear foot, so your well has a reservoir of 675 gallons of water! Put another way, you would have to pump out 650 gallons of water before your well went dry and that is before we calculate in a recovery rate...expressed as gallons per minute (which we do not know).

Still we do not need too. When soil engineers design septic systems they design them for a family of 4 to consume 150 gallons of water per day. That is the Joe basic, Smith family in rural America with no measurable amount of water conservation measures in place. So based on that, you can go 4.5 days just on your reserve. Want a dozen children...you would have less time before you would need some well recovery, less children and you could go longer. In short if your pump is at the bottom of the well, you got a lot of reserve.

My well is 290 feet deep, has water 17 feet from the ground level, with a recovery rate of only 2 gallons per minute. With a family of six, we have never run out of water. In contrast my fathers well is only 50 feet deep, yet gets 60 gallons a minute in recovery, and he has never run out of water with a family of 14. The more shallow your well is, the more gallons per minute you need. The deeper the well, the less you need.
 
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