sand point well questions

I am attempting to drive a sand point well at a property in northern Wisconsin that i recently purchased. I purchased a 2" sand pint and 2" galvanized pipe.  I have driven this down just over 20'.  When i check for the water depth with a string and weight, i hit water at 15'.  So i have 5' of water. I put a 1" PVC pipe with a foot valve at the end down the 2" casing that is 19' down.  I can draw water with a pitcher pump, but when I put a Little Giant 1/2 hp pump and pressure tank on, it will not draw water.  I prime the pump and it starts to draw water to the outlet faucet but then it spits air and no water. I am quite sure that all of my connection are air tight.  I have been told that I do not have enough water to draw from for the pump.  My questions are:

1.  Is 5' of water enough for me to pump?
2.  Since if have hit water, if I pound my 2" pipe down another 5' - 10' will I stay in the water or will I go beyond the water?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi Donald, welcome to Permies!  And welcome to northern Wisconsin

How much water did the Little Giant pump before it started spitting air?  Did you use the pitcher pump to pump any large volume of water or just a gallon or two?  Is the pressure tank new or could the baffle in it be bad?  Do you know if you're in sand or clay down where the water is?

I'm not a sand point expert so I shouldn't try to answer you questions.  But it's no fun if I don't take a stab at it, just value my input much lower than any you get from someone who actually knows a bit about it.
1.  I think 5' is plenty if the surrounding earth is sandy.  If it's clay it might not be enough.
2.  I think that you can't drive a point past the water.  Unless the aquifer is sitting on a layer of clay that you poke through.  Otherwise the only thing that I think could hold an aquifer up would be bedrock which you won't be pounding through.

Hi Donald-

My suspicion about the air in your pump is the pump is pumping out the water faster than the well can refill the casing, also an indicator that the pump is oversized. That 5 feet of 2 inch pipe has 0.816 gallons of water in it; the formula is volume = pi x radius squared x length. One way to determine a rough estimate of your well supply is use the pitcher pump you have, and start filling one gallon containers along side a stopwatch until it too starts pumping air and you can get some idea of how many gallons per minute your well can supply.

I am in sand. I never checked how much water the pump pumps before it spits air but it only runs for about 5 - 10 seconds. It is a new  pressure tank.  Is there a way to tell if the baffle is bad.  That by the way was another question I had, if I turn the faucet off, the pressure tank should fill with water right?  It does not appear to be getting water in it.

If my pump is pumping faster than the casing is filled, can I put a ball valve before or after the pump to slow down the input or output?  Or am I better off pounding the casing down deeper?

You can throttle the flow from the pump with a ball valve but only if the valve is after the pump, on the output side. If the valve is before the pump, or on the input side of things, it can cause pump cavitation which can destroy the pump.

I am hesitant to give advice on sending your well deeper. I'm not a well guy or a expert at anything really, just a layman. If you are interested in sending the well deeper, I think the best approach is to ask neighbors and others in the vicinity that have sand wells how deep theirs are. That may help establish some average. For what it's worth, try using the USDA Web Soil Survey to learn about the different layers of soil beneath your feet. It can contain information on things like how deep your first layer of sand is, and depths to obstructions (like bedrock) and sometimes available water supply at certain depths. It's a pretty cool tool. Hope this helps!

My house is on a sand point in sand.  I have a full sized pump and pressure tank.  I have no idea how deep it is but I'm guessing 15' down.  I can run a sprinkler for hours.  

If you close all the valves and allow the pump to fill the pressure tank, it should fill it with how ever many gallons the tank says it holds (likely 5 gallons).  Then the pump will shut off.  Mine runs about 70 seconds to fill the tank.  Then you can open the valve and use the water until the tank trips the low pressure point and the pump should come back on and refill it.  If you're spitting air and the pump is only running for 5-10 seconds, there is some air in the system or something else is messed up.  Maybe the foot valve isn't working right and is letting the primed pipe of water leak back down into the well?

A way to double check things would be to hook back up the pitcher pump and trying to manually pump the well dry.  If you can get more than 5 gallons out of it relatively quickly, the electric pump system is not hooked up right or is not working right.

I kind of thought with sand points that you use the 2" sand point pipe as the water sucker-upper.  Then you put a check valve at the top to keep the pipe primed.  Then your inlet to the pump would be much bigger.  Versus the smaller inner pipe and foot valve.  But I have no idea...

Hi Donald. So you have a sandpoint with the spike and the screen? attached to a 2 inch galvanized pipe which you hammered in correct? The next step usually is to put a check valve at the top of casing directly and attach it to the pump. Then you extract the air with some form of priming pump (I use a guzzler hand pump) and it pulls water. From the description above you inserted another line inside the 2 inch casing. That is not how sandpoints work. Think of a sandpoint well system as a straw in a milkshake. you have put another smaller straw inside and are sucking so you get only what is in the big straw or what can seep in. You want to use the 2 inch casing as the straw to build up vacuum and"suck" out that water from the porous ground... Sandpoints are very common here. Mine in the greenhouse goes 10 ft down and will pull 4gpm as long as there is electricity to run it...
Hope that helps
David B.

David Baillie,

Thanks for you input.  Your response makes a lot of since. I will try removing the 1" pipe this weekend and put in a check valve and let you know if that solves my problem.

David Baillie your suggestion was spot on. I removed the 1" pipe and put a check valve on the input side and it started to work.  But now i have another question.  I have a 7 Gal. pressure tank.  The pump has a 30/50 pressure gauge.  The pump runs for 12-13 minutes before it shuts off.  Then after using the water, it takes another 12-13 minutes of running to shut off again, during which time i don't have enough pressure to provide water to me trailer.  What is the possible cause of this, or is this normal?  The 2" input pipe is ice cold so I am guessing that it is full of water.  Is it the pump size,? ( I am using a 1/2 hp pump)  Is it maybe that the check value is no working properly?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

It sounds like you are sucking air... compress the ground around the Sandpoint as much as possible and run the pump for a few hours. You are trying to get the sand to collapse around the casing sealing it up. A possible scenario is the screened sandpoint end is not totally in the water table. It is possible your screw fittings on the Sandpoint sections are leaking as well. You could have something blocking the jet as well. Hard to diagnose.  I use a piston pump or a diaphragm pump on my Sandpoint they are more forgiving of air in the line. A jet pump sucking air can't generate pressure to shut off. Check you priming screw is tight as well.
All I got... let me know

i have had some health problems so it has been quite awhile since i checked this post.  since my last post i had a local plumber take a look at my well.  it was 26' deep and found water at 16', i had 10' of water in the pipe. the plumber tried to get it to pump water using his pump after putting 40lbs of preasure on the pipe. he could not get more than a trickle from the well.  i told him that i had another 5' pipe that i could drive down to see if that would help.  after driving the pipe down about 3' i checked the pipe by dumping water down it.  the pipe filled and it never went down.  i guess that this means that my point is in clay.  i checked it the next morning and the water level never changed.  one good thing that came from this is that my pipe and connections must not have any leaks (sucking air) because the water just sat there.  i guess next spring i will start looking at it again.  if i was to go deeper  do you think i will eventually run into enough water to get the pump to work (or a different pump, depending on the depth) or should i look at having a well drilled.

thanks for your input

I drove a 20’ sand spike & some how broke one pipe about a 8” below ground level at the threads. Is there a style of platform or a rough idea on a easy way to pull it out? I have tried to waterborne next to it with 20’ spike tied off with tension to remove out of ground. It hasn’t budged.

Matt Huss wrote:I drove a 20’ sand spike & some how broke one pipe about a 8” below ground level at the threads. Is there a style of platform or a rough idea on a easy way to pull it out? I have tried to waterborne next to it with 20’ spike tied off with tension to remove out of ground. It hasn’t budged.

Depending how hard it drove in you likely can't pull it out.  If I were going to try I would dig down around it till I had access to the top of it and I would weld a piece of steel with a lift eye on and see if I could pull it. If I had a good water supply source that I could pump back down I might build the lift eye so I could pump lots of water back down the hole to see if I could fluidize the dirt around the point to help with extraction.  Most likely if you are in sand you can't pump water down fast enough to matter.  But if you are still in dirt it might help.

That failing assuming you still need to go deeper I would build a driver end on the end of my pipe and try and drive it deeper.  If it has a heavy outer shell and a sealing oring you might still be able to salvage the use of that point.  If its seal is sucking air then could you run a skinnier plastic pipe down inside it to lift the water.  It would mean a reduced flow but might let the pump work still with this pump.

Usually the pipe breaking is a sign of either to light a driver pipe or letting the piece you are hitting wiggle to much side to side resulting in metal fatigue.

Oh ok, water table is at 28’. Thank you now I know a few ideas, and also I have a challenge.

Rethreaded top pipe, forced water down inside of pipe and used a car jack with a slip chain. Inch by inch removed pipe.
That’s the brief summary.

Hi.
I'm British but living in Bulgaria.
I know nothing about standpoints and wells... A neighbour came over and told me that I need to hammer my sand point down an extra metre to get better water so we did.. we hammered the living daylights out of it and got it down an extra metre. Originally it was 6 metres deep with the water table starting at 3 metres deep and now it's 7 metres deep... The price now is that there's no water flowing and when I pour water in it takes 30minutes to go down the pipe... Have I hammered it past the water and into a later of clay? Does anyone have any knowledge about this? Thanks 🙂

(I'm messaging on this forum as standpoints are uncommon in the UK and I don't yey speak enough Bulgarian to source any good information here in Bulgaria)

Welcome to Permies, Stephen! Hopefully someone who knows more will see this.