Drilling our well
To build a house you need to have access to water. To mix concrete, to clean, to drink, to live. On rural land there are several ways to get water. If you are lucky and there are water mains nearby you can get connected to them. Otherwise you will need to get a share (acciones) in a community or a neighbors well. Or of course, get your own well. Since our land has no nearby water mains, and our neighbors are also pretty far away, we decided to make a well. To make a well you would have to dig or drill to the water table. In Spain that is a lot easier said than done. In large parts of Poland it’s possible to dig a well by hand, by digging a few meters. It is not the easiest or the safest job, but it can be done. And in The Netherlands, well… Most of the country lies below the sea level. They usually have bigger problems keeping everything dry! In this region of Spain the ground is hard and rocky and the water table is not something you will reach easily with a shovel. So we needed the help of some professionals.
We talked to several well builders, to get some extra information and compare their prices. The price for a well is mainly determined by its depth, you pay per meter of drilling and tubing. Then there are a few extras, like transport costs and the necessary permissions. In Spain there are a lot of illegal wells and boreholes, but we of course wanted a legal well. So we applied for the necessary permissions. After several tragic incidents with wells in the last few years, one of them making worldwide headlines, the regulations have increased. Luckily most of the paperwork was done by an engineer that works together with the drilling company. Paperwork or no paperwork, the risk of someone ever falling into our well is zero. The drilled hole will only be 22 cm wide, while the metal pipe that goes into the hole will be 18 cm wide. So that is not wide enough for a human of practically any age to fall into. Besides that, the pipe will end a bit above the ground level and the well will be closed off.
We also talked to one of our neighbors, who also has a well, to get an indication of how deep the well can be. His well is approximately 300 meters deep, 140 meters below sea level. It was built several decades ago, when they had different technology. All the companies that we contacted use rotating drills to dig a well. But back then it apparently was more common to dig a well by pounding a large hole in the ground with an enormous weight. With a weight of 15.000 kilograms it took them 2 months to reach the water table. At some days they only managed to dig 3 meters!
For us, the drilling went a bit different. Maybe a bit less impressive than pounding a hole with the weight of 10 cars, but it was still pretty impressive! On the first day of drilling the team arrived with 3 trucks, two big ones and a small one. The small one had a small crane and carried some small pipes and flexible tubes which they needed for drilling. One of the big ones had a big crane on the back and carried a compressor and large containers filled with water. And the other big truck carried the metal pipes that were used for drilling and had a large drill on the back of the truck. The compressor is the big yellow machine on the pictures, thanks to this machine the drill can break up the rocks more easily and drill faster. The containers with water were used to clean and cool the head of the drill. The metal pipes, approximately 7 meters long, are attached to the head of the drill by screwing them on. Once they are attached they are pulled further upwards in a vertical position. After that the drilling starts. Slowly the metal pipes rotated and vanished in the ground, meanwhile the head of the drill broke up the ground and rocks and spitted out some of the dirt from a tube on the side. At times the drilling slowed down or sped up, because of changes in the soil. Besides hard and soft layers of rock, the ground also has a lot of pockets of air. We were told that this makes the drilling a bit more difficult. But after the first day, they still managed to drill 45 meters. Which is a bit better than I ever managed to dig! Not a lot better of course, just a bit ;P
Before we started with drilling, we had no idea how deep the water would be. The well builder thought it would be at approximately 250 meters deep. But it could also be 300 meters deep, like the one from the neighbor, or a lot less deep since we decided to drill on a low and more green part of the land in a small, shallow valley. They told us that the drilling would take about 5-7 days. We regularly went to the land to check on the drilling and hope for the best! Working on the well started on a Tuesday. Only 4 days later, on Friday, they hit the water table. Water was flowing out of the well from 210 meters below the ground! With 12.000 liters per hour it is more than enough for a household and 40 meters less deep than they expected. So we are happy to share this great news!
Now that we have a well, we will still need to install a pump before we can actually use it. This can still wait a while though, because we don’t need water at the moment. We will need it by the time the building of the house starts. For now we will be focusing on finishing the plans for the house. For this we are in contact with a local architect. We already have sketches, and of course a lot of ideas, but more on that later!
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2 Comments
Eva Kuiper
Hi guys,
We saw your awesome story about digging a well and we were wondering if you would recommend the company you were working with. We plan on living closeby up in the mountains and would like some kind of reference to a good drilling company.
Would be very much appreciated!
Sincerely,
Eva
New Vidas
Hi Eva, we do recommend them. They were recommended to us by our Spanish neighbour. We didn’t have any problems and everything went rapidly and on schedule. They both drilled the well and installed the pump. They don’t take care of getting the required permissions, but they have connections with a specialised company in Castellon de la Plana that takes care of that. Before you buy land you should know that, despite what real estate agents will tell you, it will take a bit more than a year to get all the required licenses to build a well. So if you are in a hurry, we would recommend getting land with access to water, either by an existing well, buying “shares” of the well of a neighbour or a connection to the water supply network of a nearby village.