Shallow well only producing a trickle of water

[tinkma]

Hello,

I drove a 2” well. The water level is about 22 feet down and the total piping length is 36 feet. I have about 14 feet of water. I am using the 2” pipe as a casing to house a 1.25” PVC pipe with a foot valve at the bottom. I am using a 1hp pump and am getting a trickle of water at a rate of 1 gal/min. The water is coming up with a lot of find sand. I have been developing the well by “plunging”.

My questions are:

Am I too deep and that is why I am getting only 1 gal/min? But I have also heard that people are getting lucky with a shallow well pump with water 40’ down.

Is the pump not good enough/ strong enough to pull up enough water? If this is so, can anyone recommend a good pump?

Or maybe I don’t have enough water? What I am sure of is that it is really sandy down there and it is extremely fine sand.

Any advice or suggestions would be really appreciated. I’m hoping to solve this problem without going to the packer/ejector system. I live in MA.

Thank you

 

[Valveman]

24' is the max any pump can draw water to the surface, and that is at sea level. Any higher than sea level and the 24' max lift gets lower. I don't see how you could pump from 22' without having a little draw down in the well, which means the pump just cannot lift from that depth. The packer makes the pump push water up instead of sucking water up, so it will work deeper than 24'.

I would say a finer screen is needed to keep the sand out, and a packer is needed because of the depth to water. It doesn't matter if the well is 90' deep, the water level has to be less than 24' for a shallow well pump to work.

 

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[Reach4]

Also, the important dimension is how far down the water is compared to the top of the pump rather than ground level, I think.