Living Off Grid – A Home Made Deep Well Pump

Reader Contribution by Ed Essex
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In the course of blogging for MEN we have met many people from all over the world. Recently that included Darren and Linda Holliday from Missouri. Darren contacted me to ask my opinion on a water pumping invention he had created. He wanted to know if it might be useful for off grid use.

Not only would it be useful but it is something I could personally use in keeping with my philosophy of having a backup for everything here. We can pump water three different ways but all of them require electricity. There are hand pumps available but to really get the volume we would like from a 300′ deep well without electricity is something I have never seen before short of a windmill.

It seems Darren is an inventor by necessity. He first ran into a problem with his own deep well. When he moved into his new place he discovered that the previous Owner had used the wrong rock down inside the well to help keep the sand out of the water. Instead of pea gravel they had used larger rock which not only didn’t keep the sand out but created other problems as well.

The only way to fix that was to drill a new hole or re-drill his existing one – both options were going to cost thousands of dollars.

Darren took matters into his own hands and created a rock extractor of sorts that he used to clean out his existing well. His story in detail can be seen on his website wellwaterboy.com. It is one of incredible ingenuity and well worth reading. There are several homemade inventions in that story besides the rock extractor

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