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New well for irrigation system

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  • New well for irrigation system

    Hi, Folks.

    I don't think plumbing is the correct forum for this but it is related to water so I will give it a shot.

    We're considering having a new well drilled / installed for use when watering out back yard. We can't really use our existing well because when we use lots of water our water turns orange / red because of the high iron content. I don't care about iron in the water for irrigating the lawn but it really makes a mess of all the fittings in the house and it just looks unappetizing. I don't really understand why our water changes colour after a couple of hours usage but it happens consistently enough to prevent me from doing it. Normal water usage results in clear flowing water whereas heavy usage results in orange water. I would have thought that the iron would settle over time but it doesn't appear to. Anyway, that's the reason we want our irrigation water supply coming from a different well. The big thing is cost. If it costs a couple of grand then we will probably do it. If it's closer to 10 grand then we definitely won't do it. It's a shame because we have a crap lawn and nothing I do helps it because we can't water it adequately and that's a (the) problem.

    Another option is to fit a system e.g. Ironmax, to remove the iron so that we can use our original well but the ones I have seen online remove 10ppm - I don't know if that's enough for us. We've had our water tested before and the iron content was not as high as 10ppm but we've never had the water tested when it's been orange and I am sure the iron content is higher at those times. I looked for a colour chart to provide an estimate of iron cntent based on colour but I couldn't find one. There's no point installing an ironmax system if it's going to be too overwhelmed to perform. Another thing is our well replenished at 2.5gpm which is really slow which means really heavy water usage could results in us running the well all the way down (this happened to me a couple of years ago when I didn't understand about replenishment rates, etc.).

    The point of this message was to get a general idea of how much the typical well drilling and pump installation is (Massachusetts). I know that each project is different and so the costs will be different too but we're just looking for a guesstimate.

    Cheers, Max

  • #2
    I got one quote back that said between 4500 and 7500. Phew, quite an expense for what amounts to little more than "water for the lawn". Hmmm.

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    • #3
      Lawn sprinkling...

      Check out those well drillers in the back of Popular Mechanics magazines. I'd bet they'd be perfect for your application.

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      • #4
        I'll check them out, Captain. I'm leaning towards the IronMax solution simply because it's cheaper and I think we need it anyway. I would run the sprinkler system from the system before the IronMax since I don't need that water to be filtered or softened. Our water quality, in terms of iron, fluctuates so much depending on the usage that it's difficult to determine what we actually need. Public water was so much easier.

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