Deep well - No Electricity - Remote Country – What are my options?

I recently got a 36 feet deep well dug. It's a roughly 4 feet diameter round (bored?) well. I started looking into my hand pump options, since I still don't have a source of energy, yet all the pumps I can find in my country only go down to ~25 feet, and I can't find a company that will ship a hand pump over this way. Any ideas?

I would probably go with a solar panel and a small pump that can handle the pressure (2 bar or 30psi should work fine). (The solar panel will need about 10x the rated power of the pump.) My rough estimate is that a 10W pump delivers about 1 liter per minute. If that goes into a small reservoir at the top (kept cool) you should have a reasonable drinking water supply. And if that fails, a bucket on a rope…

What is your suction head, I mean the deep of your water level? More than 10 meters you cannot suck water because it vaporize. You have to put a pump down in the water and use pressure to bring the water up. Can you fabricate a simple cylinder pump.



you will  need a counter weight that equals the weight of the rod and everything that goes with it.

Thanks for the ideas. Seeing as I don't have solar yet and it would cost close to a grand to get a pump shipped here, I'm gonna try to build my own out of plastic piping.

I just visited the hardware and I found their selection limiting: 75mm/50mm/40mm/32mm diameter. None of the pipes fit snugly one inside the other, since their thickness varies from 0,75 to 2mm thickness. I'm considering going with a 50mm outer and 40mm inner pipe.

What's the best way to construct a piston so that a 40mm pipe can fit snugly inside a 50 and not cause too much friction when pumping?

I'm also looking for more ideas for a check-valve and a sturdy pumping handle if anyone has any. I saw this video, but I don't have marbles either :/

I wonder if an air lift pump could work at that depth, there are DIY ones on youtube.  The pump should cost less and you can get away with a lot smaller solar panel set up, maybe 200 watts.  It would be slow I expect but could run constantly or at least whenever the sun is out.

Catch rainwater and store it.      Large tanks can be used to store your water needs.

Create a pond, and use that water for irrigation.

Water pumping windmills can be expensive however have been widely used in No electricity remote country.  Since they only pump when there is wind storage is important

Maruf, is your land on a hillside or flat?  If you are on a hillside and the well is up the hill, above where you want the water to go, you might be able to use syphoning.  Try it first with the black 1/2" drip irrigation poly line, the Well end a few feet below water level, and put the Open end down the hillside, as many feet below the water level in the well as you can manage.

With a little hand pump on the downhill end it ought to be able to fill the line, bring it out of the well, then gravity will help it fill the line heading down the hill.  Once the air is out of that line,and it starts syphoning, it will be running water, assuming the water level in the well is always above the Well end of the line.   If it works, then making sure the line is always well below the lowest seasonal water level of the well ought to keep it working.

A 600-1200 gallon water tank would be a real asset.  Make a 4" thick cement pad for it to sit on, so it won't sink into the ground and become unlevel, or become vulnerable to chewing rodents.   If the tank is above your living space/garden, gravity flow water out of the tank is also easy to use.  A tank this size, when full, can create more water pressure.

There are also good gas-powered water pumps that sit at the top of the well, and easily get the water up larger PVC pipe (with a nylon stocking type filter held on with a hose clamp, on the end to protect the pump and the water) that can then send the water for a couple hundred feet wherever you need it to go.  If you fill up your water tank every once in a while, there's no need to have the gas pump on very much.

I have a quality gas water pump that pulls upwards about 30 feet (it could do much more)  then the water goes almost level for about 200 feet, then it drops over a hillside and goes  down another 200 feet to the garden.  There's plenty of pressure to run drip irrigation.  My pump runs for 3 hours on about 1/2 gallon of gas.

TYou can make a couple piston rings if piston does not fit, mush better actually to have rings. You can cut a ring from a 40mm pipe heat it a bit and force it on the same pipe you cut it out then you have a piston ring. you will need at least 2 of this. one on both ends of the piston. you may heat it in a boiling oil or maybe try water first. PPR pipe has low melting point. If you can also get some O rings that fit then the better. Teflon from a chopping board also works great it has less friction. But you have to fashion it on a lathe machine.

25 feet is not at all too deep for a handpump. I lived with a handpump that was 80 feet deep for a few years. They are common in India -- I read once that one of the Indian designs of handpumps is popular in many countries. I know people who use handpumps more than 100 feet deep.

Rebecca Norman wrote:25 feet is not at all too deep for a handpump. I lived with a handpump that was 80 feet deep for a few years. They are common in India -- I read once that one of the Indian designs of handpumps is popular in many countries. I know people who use handpumps more than 100 feet deep.

There are two kinds of hand pump one which is above ground and sucks water from below and one that is below water and push it up. The trick for operating a hand pump is to incorporate a counter weight. then no matter how deep it is pumping is a breeze. You see that giant seesaw pumping oil from deep down. That huge hammer like thing is a counter weight.

Simple Pumps
Lifts from 325 feet deep

Bison hand pumps
Have a huge range

I'm going to add a few more options to this thread, hand pumps that work with deep wells.  Each one has its own little pluses and minuses, and the cost variation is huge, as well.

Before I do that - there are three considerations that I think are critical in picking a hand well pump:

1. How many strokes/gallon of water - in other words how much labor does it take to produce X amount of water.  Contrast that with how much water you want to use daily.
2. Do you want a pump system that could work in tandem with solar power should you be able to upgrade in the future?
3. Consider water storage as a part of the cost of the hand pump.  Without water storage, pumping water becomes someone's almost full-time job.  

(Note: The most affordable water storage option I've found thus far are 50 gallon drums that were used for food transport.  You can get these in metal or plastic, for about $15-20 from some natural food distributors.  Second most affordable is likely DIY ferrocement tanks.  All water storage options have contamination issues to consider, except possibly stainless steel drums.)

So just above are Simple Pump and Bison Pump  - two good options, but pricey.

Flojak has some much less expensive options: Flojak hand well pumps

EZ Hand Pump is cheaper, but totally looks it.  PVC based, and they look pretty much like many of the DIY tutorials I've seen online.  The website looks very spammy, but someone in Permies has ordered this before and said they received the product.  EZ Hand Well Pumps

Pre-made well bucket - this is very inexpensive, it's the type that some of the DIY videos above show how to make and I can only see it being useful for a major emergency situation.  It would be miserable to use something like this for any other reason, but if your system went down, and you had no water and no rainclouds in sight...   PVC water well bucket for emergencies - similar to DIY ones described above

And here is the "Cadillac" of hand well pumps.  It has the big advantage of pumping a lot of water per stroke.  The Waterbuck hi-flow rate hand pump

I only read about this type this year.  Yes, it's spendy (though it's in the range of the Bison and Simple pump costs).  But it moves water more easily than the others I've looked at.  Here's how it works:




And here's how it works with a solar pump.




I'm not promoting any one over the other - I'm still in the place of trying to choose which makes the most sense for us per the cost.  I hope some people with these installed will see this thread and *ahem* pipe up with their thoughts and experiences.  

I noticed that a couple of links were put out in prior posts for some hand pumps.  My question is if anyone has had any experience using a hand pump bringing up water from a deep well?  If so what brand, what depth, etc.?


Thank you