mostlygray t1_j6el3jm wrote
You literally just kind of dig around until you find water. It's down there. There are surface markers that will clue you in to where water is. A tree where there are no other trees. A low area. A gut feeling. A place where the plants are different.
It took my great-grandparents years to find a spot for the well on their property. They used a cistern for many years for drinking and the ravine for watering the animals. Eventually, they found good water. They just had to dig enough holes.
crono141 t1_j6fdor8 wrote
Should have tried dowsing. Would have found it lots faster.
/s in case it isn't obvious.
Jammin-91 t1_j6fs2aw wrote
What's dowsing?
nebman227 t1_j6fst27 wrote
Holding two "dowsing rods" in your hands and letting them "lead" you to groundwater. It doesn't work, of course. The reason that it looks like it works is the fact mentioned in other comments that there is groundwater pretty much everywhere.
Jammin-91 t1_j6ftopg wrote
Ahh, I see. I'm sure this works, and if you can't find "dowsing rods," you can grab a tree branch that has a "Y" shape, and this can function as "dowsing rods"
just-kath t1_j6futka wrote
The answer I was looking for.
mostlygray t1_j6g3z7z wrote
They did try hiring a water witch. That didn't work.
MrEZW t1_j6iy80d wrote
There are people out there who believe in this shit so much that they'd trust their job with it. I worked with a foreman who believed he could locate buried utilities like phone lines, power lines, water pipes, etc... with some dowsing rods he made out or #4 copper wire. Sometimes he would even second guess the locators markings & dowse them just to make sure. Those guys use specialized machines to locate buried utilities. I never had the heart to tell him & I just played along with it.
GamerMomm t1_j6goa34 wrote
From ranching/farming folk and can confirm that this method works.
Tashus t1_j6jfa53 wrote
>can confirm that this method works.
No you can't. Unless you dug wells everywhere the dousing rods didn't indicate, so that you could check that there wasn't water there, then all you've done is dig wells roughly at random, or with some intuition based on geography and flora.
GamerMomm t1_j6kkh5o wrote
It worked on our lands, for sure. We don’t own the land anymore, but on the 4000+ hectares we had it sure as shit did. Up until the early 2000s, we still paid a water witch and he sure AF helped us dig our wells.
Tashus t1_j6kmcll wrote
No, it didn't. You dug wells and found water, but you could have dug them in the places that it didn't indicate, and you probably would have also found water. It's nonsense.
GamerMomm t1_j6kuqyf wrote
Yes, we did.
Tashus t1_j6kut1j wrote
You did what?
Edit: You've blocked me. I get it. But truly, dousing doesn't work. Dig a hole, and you'll usually hit water. Yes, a douser can tell you "dig here", and lo and behold you'll hit water. You would also be likely to hit water if you dig the places where they don't tell you to dig.
Tratix t1_j6lbs0t wrote
And then what? It’s just a pocket of water? Is it in the dirt and you have to extract it? Do you need a pump? Does it replenish? Is it not packed with bacteria?
The concept of an underwater well just doesn’t make sense to me
mostlygray t1_j6mhn9g wrote
Ideally the water is coming from a free-flowing aquifer. You dig down a few hundred feet. Sometimes the water is sitting on top of the rock. Sometimes it's below. Sometimes it's in a mix of gravel. It could be 100 feet down, it could be 1,000 feet down. It depends on where the water is.
If the water is from an artesian well, it could be coming from a thousand miles away through the bedrock from the mountains. It could be refilled from rain water that leaks down through the water table. It could be from underground streams.
Unless the water is very shallow, there shouldn't be any bacterial contamination. You test the water to see that it's safe to drink. You're looking for bacteria, heavy metals, pesticide runoff, that sort of thing.
My parents well is about 400 feet down. Through the bedrock. The water is from an underground stream and comes up through the cracks in the rock and keeps the field next door always wet, even in a dry year. The water is high in iron but doesn't have heavy metal contamination to speak off. The copper/nickle is closer to the surface in the clay. The clay is full of iron too. At about 6 feet down, the clay has enough iron in it that a magnet sticks to it. Below that, it's a neutral gray clay that goes down to pea gravel, then bedrock. You can get water out of the gravel, but the refill time would be ridiculous so you pull from below it.
All that clay and rock acts like a filter to keep contaminates out of your drinking water.
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