Getting water from a well without electricity

Getting water from a well without electricity
For those of you who get your drinking water from a drilled well, have you ever thought about how to get clean, safe water when the power grid goes down in your area? If not, you should put some serious thought into this issue. If so, you have probably at least read about 12v solar powered well pumps, or maybe looked at hand pumps if you have a shallow well. You also, hopefully, have a good idea of what surface water sources are nearby. Both of these can be options, and both definitely have advantages, but like anything, there are drawbacks- that 12V system IS going to go down eventually, and in the case of something like an EMP, may not be functional to start with. That beautiful pond or stream near your house might not be such an attractive option once human and/or animal waste ends up washing into it, or if there is Giardia in it- you do NOT want Giardiasis, and it could be lethal in a grid down scenario. It’s going to be pretty hard, if not impossible, to counter and/or eliminate threats to your community when you are suffering from severe dehydration because you can’t get water, or you have dysentery. There is a simple way to make another alternative for getting water, known as a well bucket, or a bailer bucket. Essentially, it is a bucket or vessel of some kind with a check valve on the bottom. Drop it down a well, it fills up, and you pull it back out along with the water inside.
Materials:
2-4 feet of PVC pipe that is a couple of inches smaller than your well casing- I normally use 4” PVC since my well and those of my family members are 6” This doesn’t work well on pipe smaller than 2” The bigger the pipe is, the better it will work, as long as you are strong enough to pull it up when full of water.
PVC cap to fit your pipe. The cap needs to be smooth on the inside in order to work well. Don’t buy a cap with lettering on the inside. Nibco brand caps usually have lettering on the inside, Lasco brand usually do not.
An old inner tube from a truck tire, or similar piece of rubber.
PVC cement.
1 bolt ¼” x 1” with 2 nuts and 2 flat or fender washers
A couple of feet of wire or cable. I used 3/32″ filler rod.
How to make it:
Take the pipe cap and drill a ¼” hole in the center of the cap. Approximately halfway between the center hole and the side of the cap on the INSIDE drill 8 holes spaced evenly in a circular pattern. I like to use 5/16” holes for this on a 4” pipe, but you may want to go bigger or smaller for a larger or smaller pipe. The one in this picture has ¼” holes since it is only a 2” pipe, but bigger holes will work better, and cause the pipe to fill faster. It should look something like the one in the picture. Make sure to deburr the holes, if they have a burr on them they will not seal.

Next, lay the piece of inner tube out on a flat surface and draw a circle on it approximately the same size as the ID of your PVC pipe. Cut this circle out as cleanly as possible. Poke a small hole in the center of this piece of rubber. Take your bolt, put a flat washer on it, and push it through this hole. Now put this through the hole in the center of the pipe cap, on the inside. Put the other washer on the end of the bolt, tighten it down using one nut, and use the second nut as a jam nut. You don’t want anything loosening up and falling down the well. Look at the inside of the cap again and make sure that the rubber piece completely covers all of the holes, without getting caught on the edge of the pipe of cap. If it doesn’t, either cut a new piece or trim the existing one until if works.
       
Cut your pipe to the desired length- I usually use 2 ½ feet so that I can make four of these from a ten-foot length of pipe. They will be lighter if you make them shorter, or hold more water if you make them longer. On one end of the pipe, drill two ¼” holes 180 degrees from each other and approximately 1 ½” from the end. On the opposite end of the pipe glue the cap, taking care not to get any glue on the inner rubber flap- always apply glue to PVC pipe, not to the fitting itself. Attach a wire or cable of your choosing through the two holes you drilled on the end, and you are ready to drop this down a well and pull water up.
   
A few notes on using one of these-
Once you start dropping one of these in a well there is a chance to introduce contaminants in the well. It is best to treat or boil the water before you drink it. Some plain bleach, or pool shock, used properly, is an excellent way to treat drinking water. It is worth stocking up on it while it is cheap…
You do have to pull your pump and pipe out to use this bucket
Use a rope that is long enough to get this to the water level in your well and strong enough to pull the weight out without breaking. 550 cord works for this, if you have a long enough piece. A well that has water at 30-40 feet like mine is easy to pull water out of. If your well is a few hundred feet down you might need to build some kind of winch or crank to repeatedly draw water up.
Tie the end of the rope to something secure in case you drop the bucket- you don’t want to lose it if your hands slip, and once it’s in the well it isn’t coming back if you lose the rope. This is also why you might want to make several of these, that rope will break on you eventually, and probably at the worst time possible.
You can use this same method to make a check valve if you have some sort of manual well pump. I have made several homemade piston pumps, and this makes an excellent one-way check valve for the intake on the pump when pulling from a pond or creek.
Hopefully someone gets some use out of this. It’s easy to make several of these to put up as a contingency plan, even if you have other water sources, and at the same time, you can probably find the materials to make one even post-SHTF if need be.

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About the Author: wwes

WWES is a high school vocational teacher in North Carolina who teaches students how to grow plants and livestock, along with welding and metal fabrication. He is always looking to grow his knowledge base, and enjoys increasing his self sufficiency through growing and preserving food, as well as raising livestock.

28 Comments

  1. Mike March 19, 2021 at 15:26

    Important – use a natural hemp rope. Artificial rope will break when it’s cold and gets ice on it.

    • KOBK March 19, 2021 at 20:05

      That’s a great tip Mike.
      Thank you.

    • wwes March 19, 2021 at 22:10

      Do you have high humidity where you’re at? Here in NC the high humidity and heat in the summer seems to degrade natural fiber ropes, and I have better luck with synthetics outdoors, at least in the summer months. I’m not trying to contradict what you’re saying, just wondering if climate might have an effect on what rope is best.
      I do know that the cheap hollow braid yellow nylon rope doesn’t last anytime, even here.

      • UPCG March 20, 2021 at 10:10

        Out of curiosity, where in NC? My wife is from around Hickory.

        • wwes March 20, 2021 at 21:38

          I’m in central NC, Hickory is a pretty area.

    • Michael March 22, 2021 at 08:00

      Locally here in New England well installers use and recommend 3/8 inch nylon rope for their retrieval lines for well pumps. Cheap yellow poly rope is NOT recommended. I’ve used nylon lines on my sailboats for decades of harsh weather. Never noticed any damage from icy conditions, just sun damage over years of exposure.
      550 cord is pretty nice stuff but if your hand hauling more than a gallon worth of water up over a dozen meters or so you might need gloves. I suggest the 3/8 inch nylon as it’s easier on the hands and more abrasion-cut resistant in general than 550 cord. Losing a well bucket inside your well pipe *Might* DISABLE that well for the next attempt with a well bucket OR installing a water pump.
      Remember the amount of water required to sustain life. The one gallon per man per day was recommended for the Civil Defense manuals of the 50’s. They assumed you were just waiting in a fallout shelter for two weeks before coming out for recovery and resupply. As active duty NCO’s know far more water needed JUST for drinking when working-patrolling. A Whores bath (or helmet bath for old timers) of a wash cloth for face, hands, arm pits and groin requires a gallon of water. Crotch rot and foot problems are nasty when you cannot wash daily. Cooking requires water again at least a gallon of water per man per day here. Washing dishes and at least underwear for sanitation requires even more.
      Using surface water for sanitation might lead to 3rd world sanitation issues. You can get giardia and other water borne diseases like Cholera from washing with contaminated water. That’s why the field sanitation folks used so much chlorine in your water buffalos.
      Plain Pool Shock is good stuff, print out the instructions on how to make bleach solution from it please. Don’t use the Pool Shock with anti-algae and all that, use PLAIN Pool Shock.
      The rule of threes Security, Shelter, WATER, Food applies here.
      I was going to comment about rainwater collection and how to dig field expedient shallow wells using terrain and water loving plants for locating sites here but don’t want to annoy our hosts with off topic comments. Look them up please, useful.

      • Patriotman March 22, 2021 at 08:20

        I was going to comment about rainwater collection and how to dig field expedient shallow wells using terrain and water loving plants for locating sites here but don’t want to annoy our hosts with off topic comments. Look them up please, useful.

        You are more than welcome to add this to the discussion!

        • wwes March 22, 2021 at 08:46

          Heck yeah, please do add this, I’m sure we can all learn something from it, and I know I’d like to read what you know on the topic.
          And as a side note, it might be the cheap poly rope that I am mistakenly calling nylon. That stuff is terrible though. And on the amount of water, that is one other reason I like the 4″ PVC cut approximately 2 1/2 feet- it should hold a touch over a gallon of water, which makes it easy to figure how many times you need to drop it down a well. It also brings up a reasonable amount of water without being too heavy to handle, if you’re not dropping it down a really deep well.
          One other note I forgot to add in the article- I tried one of these with a thin piece of oiled leather in place of the rubber flap, and it works acceptably well, as long as the leather is pliable. Rubber is easier and seems to work better as long as we have it around though.

        • Michael March 22, 2021 at 16:18

          Thanks Patriotman for the invite but this would be a full article and just recreating what is available on good sites on the web.
          But points to think about. In nature surface water is nasty, dead critters and giardia and such. Needs filtering to be safe. Folks might not realize that a used ceramic water filter (AND Most other camping filters using pore size filtration) IF it Freezes is worthless. Microcracks from expanding water to ice in the wet filter. Micro sounds small but compared to the pore size of the filter media it’s the Grand Canyon to nasty bugs. So when in doubt get a new one if freezing might have happened. Sucks to find out LATER when your belly is in agony and diarrhea rules your life. Bad water will KILL you with out medical support.
          Filter “Life” measured in thousands of gallons is TESTED using Clean City Water. Surface water will greatly reduce that amount so PREFILTER your water with several layers of clean tee shirt materials. Bird poop, silt, decayed leaves all KILL your filter quickly, Ok. Some know that, others may not, no offence intended here.
          PLAIN Pool Shock is your friend No anti-algae and such toxic to humans ok? Look up instructions for making bleach solution.
          A drizzle of rain captured in a clean tarp or plastic sheeting funneled into a container makes pretty decent drinking water. Unless your downwind of a burning city or fallout but lets stay reasonable here. At least easier on the filter. An example a CLEAN 14 X 20 foot tarp collects in a decent .1 inch drizzle some 17 gallons, bump that rain up to a light rain 1/4 inch it’s 44 gallons and so on. BUT you need somewhere to store it yes?
          Best is a roof gutter system with a first flow wash system where the first 10 minutes or so of the rain is diverted to your non-potable supply (Toilet or Garden use?) and the rest collected into say some food grade IBC totes and such. But lets assume that’s not an option as the house is gone.
          Lowes sells 20 foot by 100 foot rolls of black plastic sheeting for a 100.00. Really Heavy duty stuff 6 mill tough. With pebbles for tie off’s and 550 cord just how BIG a water collection set up could you do? A cubic foot hole lined with plastic holds around 7+ gallons. Digging a plastic lined cistern and setting up a rainwater collector can be done with a shovel and then you NEED a Lid or you have created a surface water source. If you had a typical door it’s a little over 2 feet wide and over 6 feet high. As a lid for a 2 foot X 6 foot deep x 6 foot long cistern that 20 foot wide plastic still has about a foot on each side for the log edges and that cistern could hold about 500 plus gallons of water. Sheet plastic makes awesome emergency shelters, just saying. Double layered and filled in-between with grasses and such a decent emergency insulated shelter. So many uses almost as good as duct tape :-) No cache should be with out a roll in my humble opinion.
          Emergency well digging AKA Indian Wells. Speaking from New England not the desert here ok? Even a seasonably “dry” creek is likely to have water in the deep areas if you dig a couple of feet down. Trees like willows and beeches need lots of water and they have shallow root structures. Digging near them generally finds first damp soil and a little deeper you should find a seep of water that will partly fill your hole. Surface water like a pond can get some crude sand filter style action if you dig a well about 3 meters away from the pond edge. You still need to Tee Shirt filter it before the micropore camping filters do their thing.
          BEWARE Trees don’t differentiate between “Wild Water” and man made septic drain field water.
          ALL surface water sources are nasty. BUT you need to recon around to see just how nasty they are. Before taking water from that bubbling creek look around and go UPSTREAM at least 200 yards to see if their is a gross contamination situation. A dead critter rotting in that creek is bad news for TODAY. If you clear that, the water smells good in about a day I’d be willing to process that water for use. Man made pollution is worse, a sheen of old oil from a car wreck or a septic system leaking into it is a look somewhere else situation.
          Hope this helps

  2. SWO March 19, 2021 at 16:18

    Another way to get water out without electricity. Can go down to 325 feet. Priced one out for 225 feet came in at about $2,000. Yeah, way more than PVC option, but it’s way more efficient. See, https://simplepump.com/our-pumps/hand-operated/

    • Matt March 19, 2021 at 19:16

      There also the Idaho Pump kits. Hand powered and a 300′ pump runs just a smidg over $400.
      https://idahohandpump.com
      Matt

      • wwes March 19, 2021 at 21:38

        Both of those are really nice, I’m wanting to get one of the hand pumps eventually. They are definitely nicer than my PVC bucket lol
        The main pro to the PVC bucket is it is easy to make, and dirt cheap- I made four of them 2 1/2 feet long and 4″ diameter for less than $40 total.

    • Ralph k March 20, 2021 at 14:03

      SWO,
      I had one of these for 2 years, originally obtained it after suffering power outage for 2 days and no water from the well. Was in an extremely dry environment. It was expensive but very worth it. Can easily pump into the pressure tank of the household system. Aircraft grade materials and construction. When I moved, was able to sell it and recover full cost. Highly recommended.

    • MikeJ March 21, 2021 at 20:40

      Agree 100% with the Simple Pump. We had one installed at the same time they placed the 240VAC regular pump, The well is at 230 feet, the 240V is at 220′, and the Simple pump is at 130′. It doesn’t need priming, works in sub freezing temps, and has the option of using a 1/5 HP 12 VDC “scotch yoke” style pump, that while it is not meant to pressurize a tank, will fill a reservoir to which you may attack a 12VDC pump, which will pressurize the tank. If that fails, it’s back to bucket and hauling but that’s in the Contingency part of the water plan. I will include the idea in this article as the Emergency part of the plan. Thanks.

      • wwes March 22, 2021 at 08:44

        This idea is definitely one to be put under the “emergency” part of the plan, it would not be preferred as a first choice. It works well but it is high effort for the amount of water you get, and it is SLOW, especially on a deep well.

  3. Anonymous March 19, 2021 at 19:17

    5

  4. tballard56 March 20, 2021 at 00:15

    A tip on using liquid bleach to disinfect the water – bleach loses its effectiveness at about 10% or more per month, so it is pretty much useless after 10-12 months. Better to buy the dry pool shock and mix it up when needed – it lasts much longer.

    • wwes March 20, 2021 at 08:59

      Thanks for that tip, I never knew that. I’ll have to rotate out my older bleach and replace it with more pool shock

  5. UPCG March 20, 2021 at 00:32

    Speaking from experience when I was interning at our embassy in a foreign country years ago, one that I had visited before several times and used the local water workout issue, giardia is not fun; though the embassy medical personnel were not sure if it was giardia or something less, that’s what they treated me for.
    Thanks for the how-to. I’ll hopefully be able to try it out this summer.
    Finally, it’s my first comment here. I’ve been lurking for a while. So, hi all.

    • wwes March 20, 2021 at 09:03

      I’ve been blessed enough to never have it, and I hope to keep it that way, your experience echoes what I’ve heard. There are some other variations of this design too, some of them use a toilet flapper for the seal. I liked this design because it used things that I had around the house, and that everyone likely would. I hope it works well for you!

  6. Arthur Sido March 20, 2021 at 01:17

    Is it just me or are the images not loading? I tried a couple of different browsers with no luck.

    • Rucksack Rob March 20, 2021 at 07:55

      Didn’t load for me either…. anxious to see them.

      • wwes March 20, 2021 at 09:05

        They were loading when I put the article up, and for some reason they weren’t this morning. They should be working now.

        • Arthur Sido March 20, 2021 at 12:50

          I see them now, thanks!

          • wwes March 20, 2021 at 21:42

            No problem, thanks for pointing out that there was an issue!

  7. Anonymous March 20, 2021 at 02:31

    4.5

  8. Bobbie Piety March 20, 2021 at 10:13

    Everyone should know that bleach dissipates in time. A brand new jug of bleach will be useless some months later. Chlorine tablets may be better as they keep longer. Just sayin’.

  9. Levi Garrett March 29, 2021 at 12:34

    Great tips from everyone! I just wanted to echo the statement in the article that you want to avoid introducing dirt or other contaminants into your open and exposed well when using one of these well buckets. Don’t lay the bucket on the ground, and as you’re pulling the rope up, don’t let it touch the dirty ground either. Keep something like a clean rubbermaid tub nearby that you can coil the rope into to keep it clean. You can also buy or make a tripod and pulley system to make pulling and emptying the bucket up easier. This website has some good products or ideas for making your own:
    https://waterbuckpump.com/
    It’s also wise to lay up a supply of clean/sanitzed food-grade barrels and 5 gallon buckets for collecting and moving water. Only use them for clean water and nothing else. Installing a cheap spigot onto a 5-gallon bucket can also create a makeshift “faucet” for things like washing hands or other similar tasks.

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