Do-it-yourself well cleaning

Recommendation points

• Preparation for work and safety precautions
• Option one: manual cleaning
• Option two: excavation with a grab bucket
• Option three: drain pump
• Option four: using a homemade scoop
• Cleaning the inner walls of the well

After many years of operation, a lot of silt accumulates at the bottom of the well, the water becomes cloudy, and an unpleasant taste and smell appears. To avoid losing usable depth and reducing water quality, periodically clean and repair the well. How to do it yourself, you will learn from our article..

When the wells, which should be fed from the upper aquifers, lose their tightness, water from the upper water enters them. It gradually applies sand and clay of various fractions, which raise the bottom of the well, reduce its practical depth, and clog the filter layer at the bottom. At the same time, the flow rate decreases slightly or does not decrease at all. Of greater importance is the accumulation of light sediment at the bottom. One awkward movement when drawing water is enough to turn it into a cloudy suspension, which will take several days to settle..

Preparation for work and safety precautions

Bottom cleaning work is time consuming and partly unsafe and should not be carried out alone. If you are going to descend into a well shaft, you need to make sure there is enough oxygen at the bottom for breathing. To do this, you need to lower a lighted candle or an icon lamp in an empty bucket to the bottom. When working inside, the head must be protected with a helmet, and if the well is gassed, it is necessary to get a gas mask. Only two people need to lift the bucket of silt, holding the handle of the crank from different sides.

Before starting manual cleaning, pump out as much water as possible. Think ahead about how you will get rid of debris and dirt. Also note that in order to restore the bottom filter after cleaning, it will be necessary to fill the bottom of the well with sand and gravel in the amount that was used during the construction. This is usually a third of the ring height for gravel and a quarter for sand. And since the bottom will rise after backfill, clean to the appropriate depth.

There are several ways to get rid of silt and sand from your well..

Option one: manual cleaning

You can get sludge from the well manually by dropping to the bottom and picking up the dirt with a shovel with its further shipment. It is most convenient to get silt from the well with a 30–40 liter bucket, which is fixed on a rope and lifted with an ordinary crank. In it you can go down to the bottom.

This cleaning option ensures that the bottom is cleaned. It is good for shallow to medium wells, in areas where there are no unstable soil layers. Disadvantages of the method: the risk of falling from a decent height or catching “quicksand” when working with a shovel at the bottom. For wells with a ring diameter of less than 100 cm, a small bucket is used instead of a bucket.

Option two: excavation with a grab bucket

The manufacture of a grab and the rules for working with it is a topic for a separate discussion. But the method itself is to get the dirt from the bottom with a special bucket. The main advantage of this method is the ability to clean wells of any depth and diameter, the work is done quickly enough.

This method has two main disadvantages. First, finding and renting a grab bucket can be very difficult, so you often have to do it yourself. Secondly, the grab will not be able to pick up silt from the walls, so cleaning is carried out in several stages:

1. Remove sludge from the central zone of the bottom.
2. Chipping silt from the walls using a crowbar on a rope.
3. Re-excavate.

Option three: drain pump

If you were able to take a sample of bottom debris and made sure that the composition contains only sand, sandy loam and small lumps of clay, you can pump out this substance with a slurry pump. The disadvantage of this method is immediately clear – many people cannot afford to buy a slurry pump. And not every pump will be able to lift the pumped mass from the bottom of a deep well, therefore, at a height of over 17-20 meters, it is better to abandon this idea.

The rest is simple. The pump is installed directly on the bottom, it is turned on for the time during which the pump is able to pump out 2–2.5 times more water than the volume of accumulated sludge. The hose is led out to a pre-prepared place for waste disposal. Sometimes you need to wait until the water in the well rises and softens the compressed deposits, then clean again. You can also use two pumps at the same time, one of which will drive water inside the well, raising the sludge, and the other will pump out the dissolved suspension outside.

Option four: using a homemade scoop

Well, and a completely budgetary option for cleaning – using a homemade scoop. It is made from a pipe cut of 100 mm, no longer than 2/3 of the diameter of the well. One end of the pipe is cut at an angle of 30–35 °, the other is muffled with a removable plug. The pipe must be laid with the cut up and welded on top of two ears at the edges. They will be used as bindings for two ropes. It is preferable to use ropes of different colors or mark them in any way.

The scoop is thrown to the bottom of the well with its point downward and at an angle of 20-30 ° from the vertical. When the scoop sticks into the bottom, you need to pull on the rope attached to the side of the cut. This will allow the scoop to move a little and scoop 2-3 kg of dirt inside the pipe. The operation must be repeated a large number of times, so get ready to spend more than one day cleaning.

Cleaning the inner walls of the well

A fair amount of dust, organic deposits, and sometimes even mold and moss accumulate on the walls of the well. Cleaning needs to be done for two reasons. First, it will save the water from future pollution. And secondly, it is necessary for further work on repairing joints and restoring waterproofing.

The walls are cleaned by hand, moving on a swing seat suspended from two ropes. The seat can be made from an inch board. Self-tightening knots are used for fastening. Thus, you can regulate the movement from the top to the bottom of the well, from where you climb a rope ladder or rope with knots. It is very convenient to work from the hanging seat: it is possible to turn in both directions and clean 100% of the surface around you, which is difficult when working from stairs.

There is another option for height adjustment. Ropes with a tightly tied seat are attached to the collar of the well and completely wound around it. Then a third rope is attached and wound up as the seat is lowered down. If you pull on this rope, the crank will rotate in the opposite direction and lift the rider. To fix the seat at the desired level, it is enough to fasten the rope to the ear of a concrete ring, and if it is not there, to the center of the seat itself..

First you need to thoroughly clean the walls of the well with a soft metal brush. If there are chips and delamination at the seams, they are removed. Mechanical cleaning is carried out from top to bottom so that dust does not accumulate on the lower rings. After cleaning with a brush, the walls of the well must be doused with water from a hose to wash off all impurities.

In addition to cleaning the well, it is necessary to periodically repair it and a number of preventive measures aimed at maintaining the purity of the water. Observing simple requirements, you will be able to take fresh and tasty water from the well for a long time.