Driven well looses prime after a few hours

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Dkiser22

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Here's my story..
Finally decided it was time to get some grass on my lawn and didn't want to pay the high price of city water. My home had a shallow well plumbed to the sprinkler system that had been filled/plugged prior to buying the house so I figured if it worked in the past it should work now. So I did some online research and decided to drill my own well using the pvc pipe and water house method. I had checked the gov. Website for other wells in my area for static water level, depth and soil conditions and everything looked promising - static water levels varied from 8-20 feet. The pvc drilling was all going great until I got down about 12 feet and my cutting stopped comming to the surface because of how sandy my soil is. I would have tried bentonite but I couldn't locate any in my area so I gave up on the pvc meathod, bought a steel sand point, pipe and a post driver. As rough as it was on my hands it was actually going really fast. Unfortunately this was my first attempt T this and I made a big mistake on my first piece of pipe. The drive cap wouldn't fit inside of the post driver so i used a cheap coupling directly on top of the pipe I was driving . I kept it tight but after I got down 5 feet or so I notice that the pipe threads were buckling/swaging inside of the pipe. At this point I went back to the store bought the correct couplings that would engage all of the threads (not just half of them like the previous) and I bought some short pieces of pipe to go between the drive cap and the pipe I was driving. The first stick of 10' pipe was to far down to pull up and replace so I used pipe dope and tightened the new coupling as tight as possible hoping that it would hold. As I got down a few more feet I noticed that it was still loosening up so not wanting to risk a total failure I retightened it and spot welded the coupling to the pipe. Everything else went smooth for here on. I bought a pitcher pump mounted it up top and after about 20 pumps I had water!! ( I had previously measure about 10' of water in the well pipe but to see it pump out had a whole different feeling.. this is where the problem started .. after an hour or so I would have to pump it quite a few times to get the water back to the surface . And over night I was right back to 20 pumps. Since I don't know much about any of this stuff I put a ball valve just under the pitcher pump, pumped it up and closed the valve . If I'm not mistaken this should have held the water in the pipe up to the ball valve but it didn't . I checked all of the connections up top. Retightened everything and iam still loosing prime . I went ahead and hooked up my electric pump (teed off from the pitcher pump) ran it to my sprinklers and aside from having to prime it with the pitcher pump it works great!. Obviously there is no foot valve on it but I do have a check valve before the pump. I had read somewhere ( probably on this forum) that it's not a good idea to pre-drill a hole for a driven well because the earth needs to seal around the pipe. If I do have a leak at one of the fittings I'm sure that it would be the first one that I messed up.

Soo my question is are there any other possibilities that could be causing my loss of prime other than a leaking coupling on the well pipe? If I wait long enough could the ground eventually settle and create a seal around the couplings ?
I know that it is possible to run a 1" pipe inside of the 1.25" steel pipe but I'm unsure if this would effect the pump flow. The pump has a 1" inlet so I'm thinking that it would be fine.
Is there anyway other than starting over to seal up the well pipe couplings ? . The suspected flaw is between 8-10 feet below the surface. If I had to I could probably dig down that far and wrap it with some fiberglass or something but I would like to see if anyone has any better ideas before digging a massive hole on the back yard .
Thanks,

20' of 1.25" galv. Pipe
5' sand point
 
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