Quote:
Originally Posted by StirCrazy
Ok, so I am leaving tomorrow for kamloops for a week to buy a house. We realy like one that is in heffley creek, but are also looking in westsyde, barnhartvale, ryligh (sp) and some other area's.
the one in Heffley has a surface well and the wife is all freaked out about it and I am a little concerned. Does anyone have a well and know enought to explain the problems that are associated with surface wells and how to overcome them?
Steve
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At my place out at shuswap, we run on a "sand point". Surface wells are basically really shallow wells. In my case, the sand point is only 15ft deep.
The problem with surface wells is contamination from surface water. If you fertilize nearby, or are close to your neighbours septic field, you can be in trouble.
The plus side, is usually a surface well produces lots of water (as they hit good water and stopped drilling/digging), with lower pumping costs with a jet pump rather than an "in well" pressure pump. As well, you can acutally remove a lot of iron with a simple paper filter. From deep wells the iron is not oxidized and dissolved in the water. if you let it contact the air in a bucket, the iron will precipitate out . So sometimes you'll get lower TDS water with a surface well.
Of course, the way we deal with it is in 2 ways : First, get the water tested once in a while for impurities and bacteria.
Second -- water pump, ballast tank, filters, water softener, UV light to kill bacteria. But out there, we usually don't drink that water and use 5 gal water jugs to take water from town.
If you add a RO unit after everything else you should have quite pure water.
In the end, you can get good water out of the tap, but you are going to have some costs involved with it. The softener salt, filters, RO membrane, UV light bulbs and the occasional shocking DO add up.
Of course, this depends a lot on what kind of surface well and where it is located. If you are at the low end of a field with cattle -- e.coli is a big worry. If you pull straight from a fast running stream you are a bit better off. I've seen surface well that are really "at the surface" and once that are about 15-30ft. I think the definition of surface well is less than 50ft deep.
PS. I have a few people that I work with that live up the heffley-creek valley -- a little "redneck" but most of the people are quite friendly. It's one of those areas where people actually say "hi" and talk to anyone. I'm creepy looking and when I've been out there for work and having a smoke break -- anyone walking by will stop just to shoot the breeze. Some of the other small towns I go to, I just get a funny glare.
And have you heard of the Cedric's water/amusement park getting built in Kamloops ($250 million build).
*edit : found this in my old bookmarks, a good read --
http://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/en/co/buho/buho_003.cfm