Well, well, well...

[CatherineB]

The opportunities for puns are endless, and feel free :roll: , but in all seriousness...

I have just lifted a manhole cover in our new "lawn" (slightly hampered by it being under the trampoline) as the architect hadn't spotted it (being under said trampoline), and we needed to find out whether it affected our understanding of the drainage for the house.

It's a well. A big well. Not very close to the house, and the water is not at all close to the surface, but, well, it's a well. I don't really know what else to say!

Except, should I be worried? I can't think that I should be. It looks in good nick from what I can see. There is one pipe feeding into it, from the general direction of the house, so I suppose we need to understand where that's coming from - or do we? If we're redirecting all the kitchen-area drainage anyway, as long as we know all our sources of water/waste have an outlet, does it really matter if there's an outlet that no longer has a source?

And I wonder why it is there. It surely predates the house, which (being Edwardian) I would have expected to have been connected to a public water supply when built? Perhaps it belonged to the farm, on which land I believe our stretch of houses were built. Perhaps it will come in handy for watering the garden if we have another hosepipe ban!

 

[Penners]

It's always exciting to find a well. But if you're planning to use the water for any purpose at all, you really should be sure that you know where that pipe leads from. OK, watering the garden isn't likely to cause too many problems, but if it were me I'd want to know that my veg had been watered with innocuous stuff.

I suppose you're sure that it's definitely a well and not an old cesspit?

 

[CatherineB]

No, I'm not planning to do anything with it! How would I know whether it's a well or a cesspit? It doesn't smell, at least obviously, and presumably no modern "conveniences" are draining into it. Does it matter, if it's just going to sit there?

 

[Nigel Watts]

How exciting! Worth looking into I would have thought.

 

[Feltwell]

And I wonder why it is there. It surely predates the house, which (being Edwardian) I would have expected to have been connected to a public water supply when built? Perhaps it belonged to the farm, on which land I believe our stretch of houses were built.

Maybe, but maybe not. My house is not that much older than yours - 1899 - and we have a well that I'm pretty sure was put in when the house was built. It doesn't appear on a map of the site from 1882, but another well does - which we know is under next door's driveway. Ours is without doubt a well rather than a cesspit, as it has the original (broken ) hand pump on top.

If you're out in the sticks then no mains water in Edwardian times wouldn't have been that rare I reckon. The larger towns mostly gained mains water systems in the 1860's and 1870's I believe.

 

[Flyfisher]

How would I know whether it's a well or a cesspit? It doesn't smell, at least obviously,

Cess pits don't really smell (that much) if they're working correctly. We don't have a well but all the ones I've seen look a bit like a brick chimney, albeit built underground. I'd also expect the water level to rise and fall with the water table.

We do have two cess pits/septic tanks (still can't remember the difference) and they are much more 'tank'-like and the water level doesn't seem to vary very much over the course of a year.

You could try lowering a small bucket or jar on some string and collect a sample of the water. I wouldn't recommend drinking it before proper testing but well water should at least look like drinking water. I don't think that would be the case if it really was a cess pit. :lol:

Whatever it is, it sounds far enough from the house not to be a problem (and even wells underneath houses need not be a problem) BUT - mention of a trampoline suggests children so I'd be quite concerned about the physical security of the well. Not concerned in the sense of not wanting the well but concerned in the sense of really being sure that children could not open whatever lid there is over the well.

 

[worms]

Cess pits don't really smell (that much) if they're working correctly

We do have two cess pits/septic tanks (still can't remember the difference)

As far as I am aware, cess pits are not meant to "work" - they fill up and need emptied - unlike septic tanks which are designed to allow biological breakdown of waste, sedimentation of solid residues and run-off of water.

With regard to the "well" in this case, I would want to know where the pipe was going to or coming from. What is the pipe made of? How deep is the water? And how deep is the whole thing from cover to base? What is the construction? Is it lined in any way?

 

[MatthewC]

BUT - mention of a trampoline suggests children

Perhaps Catherine is just a bouncy sort of person?

 

[CatherineB]

I'm not worried about the children (and yes, Matthew, on a good day I am pretty bouncy, but the trampoline's not officially for me!); the cover is very heavy and I had trouble lifting it on my own. Nobody is going to open it by accident.

The house is early 1900's, we think 1904, and is typical of an expanding city - it was on the next stretch of land to be developed as the town got bigger. Being what I would term an "upper middle class house", it would have had all mod cons, such as they were, so I think would have had drainage.

The "well" looked to be of fairly regular construction, of large blocks rather than bricks, although I didn't have either torch or camera with me. The water level was low; perhaps 2m below the ground level, although difficult to tell - I remember thinking I really wouldn't want to fall in, with no one even knowing I was at the house then! I will keep an eye on the water level now I know it's there.

The pipe going into it is, I think, plastic, so fairly modern. Either that or one of those red clay pipes, but in VGC. But it's not a thick pipe, say 10cm in diameter, so unlikely to be carrying toilet waste? My best guess would be that it's coming from some gutters; possibly the guttering to the annexe, since the architect thought he'd traced all the pipes from the main house to other drains. The annexe is not plumbed in, so it would definitely just be rainwater in that case. Hmm, I have copies of the plans for the building of that annexe - sadly, I have also just had half a bottle of wine (which is all it takes nowadays), so should probably leave investigation of those plans to the morning.

My best guess is that the thing's been sitting there essentially unused since I don't know when, and that someone thought it would be a good idea to drain the annexe's gutters to it, rather than to the other drains, when they were building that 20 years ago. And that we should just leave well alone, while at the same time being aware of its presence and monitoring its water levels.

But next time the elderly previous owner calls me to ask if she can have the tiles off the kitchen wall, since she's heard we're ripping the kitchen out, or some fingerplate off a door that she's particularly fond of but forgot to unscrew before she left, I shall interrogate her as to what she knows about the well, and why she never saw fit to mention it, when she's mentioned all sorts of much less interesting things ad nauseam... :roll:

 

[Horace]

I found a well, tested it as suggested above, and fitted an electric pump. Free water for the garden and no hospipe ban. You don't need an extraction licence (unless you use about a milk tanker full a day!)but I believe you do have a duty not to contaminate ground water so you should fully investigate the pipe into it.

You will need to get someone to test the amount of water in the well. Some (like mine) have surging flows at their base, others rely on seepage through the unmortared bricks. Before you decide to use it, you need to check this by runnng a pump and seeing how much the level falls after running a pump for a couple of hours. Generally the water is extremely hard so its not practical to use it in the house as softening it costs a fortune.

Hope the above is of help.

 

[JoceAndChris]

How exciting! But do make sure your daughters, and later on their showing- off boyfriends, are fully aware of how really really horrible it would be to die by falling in a well! My experience is that children get fascinated by wells - they need to know how seriously dangerous they are, especially if they're HTs with biceps.
Apart from that, I think they're a useful, interesting feature, and no real cause for alarm, providing you get the water tested if you plan to use it and figure out what water is going in there. The council came and tested our well water without charging, but that was because it is our only drinking supply. Amazingly, although I'd been drinking gallons of the stuff, it was found to contain high levels of the most dangerous form of E Coli. I, and all my visitors, family etc had been just fine though.

If your well is anything like the one here the water level will be at it's highest in Spring and lowest in September. It's interesting to watch it going up and down, I used to panic it might flood the basement kitchen, where it's located, but magically it never has.

Dr Carrington, who had a look at my well last week, said that it used to be the specific job of highly skilled well-makers who'd be much in demand and travel about. Mine is rubble stone, cylindrical, very tightly knitted, about 7 metres deep. It's quite a beauty, and I've thought of having a thick, Perspex lid made, and lighting fitted inside, as I've seen in a nearby pub. But that's only suitable if you arent drinking it, as the light encourages growth.
The water's fairly hard but no worse than the mains water in Lincolnshire.

It now runs through a "candle" type filter arrangement.

Enjoy your well, and yes, get the previous owner to tell you all she knows!

 

[DaveBrigg]

It might be that the pipe is not an inlet into the well, but an access point for a pump. We have what sounds like a similar arrangement, with an outside well. There is a hole in the wall just below surface level, but it has a lead pipe coming out, held centrally by a chain to make it drop down the middle of the shaft into the water several metres below. At some point the occupants must have got tired of lifting buckets, and fitted a hand pump in the house instead.

 

[d49xc]

I would second others in that security of the top cover is essential.
Apart from the obvious risk of someone falling in most well contamination is due to surface muck etc getting into the well from poorly fitting covers.
If it is a well it is likely to be around 1m in diameter and will extend down to the water table.
Whether it is lined in brick/stone or unlined and how deep it is will depend on the local geology of the area. Acquifiers half way up a hill are not uncommon (a perched acquifier) but are often quite thin in depth (shallow amount of water in bottom of well) - but would be OK for the amount a house would need in victorian times.

The well may give hard or soft water depending on the underlying strata of the acquifier that is supplying the well.
Limestone based acquifiers give hard water, sandstone based give soft (and often quick corrosive) water.

The pipe may well be when some dkhead builders thought to use the well as a ready made soakaway from the gutters.
Apart from now being illegal it is highly undesirable as it introduces contimanitated surface water direct into the acquifier without it being purified as it soaks down through the ground to the water table.
Alternate it may also be an exit pipe (usually 1.25" galvanised steel) going to a remote pump nearby (this depends on how deep the well is as to wthether the pump could be surface or bottom mounted)

How much a well will produce per day hour or whatever is highly complex and not dissimilar to questions asked about how much an oil well will produce: and we know how much money oil companies spend on this sort of analysis.
As you extract water a drawdown will occur in the well an this drawdown will produce a hydraulic gradient in the immediate locality to the well and this gradient will encourage water to flow into the well. All this depends on the strata and indeed the type of soil in the immediate vicinity to the well (pebbles,sand, rocks etc) as to how good the well flow will be.
As one might guess there will be an equilibirum where a certain amount of drawdown is balanced by the amount of water extracted and the amount to water inflowing (we are assuming here a contant pumping type well application such as commercial water/oil wells)
It is possible to damage a well by overabstraction (and even more so for oil wells) as a very steep hydraulic gradient created in the immediate vicinity starts to wash out the soil into the gaps in the strata leading into the well itself clogging it all up. ( in oil wells you start to get excess water mixed in with the oil and the water/brine starts to curve in over the top of the well drawdown gradient in the strata, mixes with the oil and you end up with a mess all mixed up together coming out of the pipe.....which you then have to separate out.

Abstraction licences are only needed about 20 m3/day!
use for drinking must now be approved by council - don't know details
I use mine for all outside/garden/car washing type uses.
A submersible pump will be needed if the water is deeper than around 20ft. You cannot suck up water from a well to a surface mounted pump when the water is in theory around 30ft below the ground (Atmospheric pressure)..... but most pumps have a quoted 24ft limit as they cannot produce a Laboratory quality level of suction.
To get round this problem my well has an access shaft some 15ft deep before the well shaft proper starts allowing the pumping equipment to be mounted some 15ft below ground level and hence only some 18-20ft above the water level.

 

[AMc]

I would seriously hope that even the dullest builder wouldn't use a well as a soakaway. As said earlier sending waste water into the filtered water supply would be seriously antisocial esp. if any of your neighbours or farmers are using well water.

FWIW we have a well. It's now inside the house but when the house was built it was outside the back door.
Then the house was extended probably in the 1850s and it became part of the back kitchen.
We found it when we were excavating the floor.
It was covered in a massive heavy grate capped over with concrete.
It had a lead pipe going all the way down into it, probably about 10cm across which had until quite recently been used in that kitchen.
It was worth a fair bit in scrap BTW.

The builders offered the choice of capping it, filling it or making a feature of it - we did the later at considerable expense but to a very pleasing effect.

First I had my electrician put in some outdoor spot lights

Then had a stainless steel 'top hat' constructed & fitted 19+10mm laminated glass into it with another stainless steel ring bolted over the top.

There is a vent pipe under the 'hat' to prevent condensation on the glass.

The well is 4m to the silty bottom and the water level is about 1m above that. During the late summer the water table had dropped to the point where a plank across the width at the bottom had become exposed but its now covered with quite a bit of water.
If the end of civilisation comes I'll take the lid off an we'll have relatively safe drinking water

If anyone has a good link to how this kind of well is built I'd love to read up, my research came to nothing.

 

[Flyfisher]

What a wonderful feature for the house. Definitely the right decision, I'd say, rather than just hiding it from view.

I'm also intrigued about how they built such things. I recall watching a Fred Dibnah programme many years ago about a mineshaft he was digging in his back garden using a traditional method. I can't remember the precise details but I dimly recall he had some sort of steel collar thingy supporting the sides of the hole, upon which he built a ring of bricks and mortar. He then hand-dug the next section of the shaft and (I think) used some sort of jacking arrangement to force the metal collar down into the newly dug section of the shaft. He then built another ring or two of bricks and mortar below the previous ones and kept repeating the process.

Fred's shaft was a fair bit larger than a well though. Most wells I've seen look too small to be able to bend over to do the digging or even lower a bucket past the person doing the digging. Very small boys perhaps?

 

[AMc]

My well is about 1.2m across which is about the same as a neighbouring farm. I suspect that's about the minimum to allow a man with a short handled spade to be able to dig in a spiral fashion going round and round.
My well has what looks like a metal collar embedded at the bottom with a plank across it. I've wondered if you sat on the plank and dug by your feet.
It seems sensible that you would brick downwards (or how else would you manage?) but I've never found a proper reference to how it was done and I'd love to know. People always ask about it and it would be nice to show off - sorry, explain it to them

 

[d49xc]

Some good pictures there.
As regards using of an old well shaft as a soakaway bit - 'fraid so...I've seen it.

As to how they dug it......this is the std system from old medieval times
Get a ring of oak - usually it was an old oak wagon wheel with all the spokes knocked out so usually approx 1m in dia
Place flat on ground.
Start building up circles of bricks on the top edge of wheel rim.
Person in centre digs ground away underneath rim.
Rim sinks down into ground as more as more bricks are build up on it and as the digger digs underneath it.
and so on till you get to the water level - or as far below as you can get with bailing out the incoming water
Weight of bricks forces unit down.
A mod is to have a sharp edge on the bottom ring to provide a "cutting edge" - the steel rim of the wagon wheel edge did the job in effect.

The problems.....
It is easy for the shaft to start going "off plumb" as it decends
It is easy depending on the soil strata for the sinking shaft/brick assembly to jam against the sides of the shaft.
Its easy to drop a brick on the one at the bottom doing the digging!
The outside of the well is not compacted so surface water can later seep down through the loose backfil down into the water table - so sealing the top is v.important to prevent contamination.
Limited to about 30 -40ft deep because of the construction system.

After time in use the wheel rim will start to rot and then the bottom rows of bricks will start to fall in and progressively the shaft will then collapse.
To try and avoid this problem mine was done as follows
As well as the bottom ring there was another ring some 3ft above with bricks infilled between.
Some sort of iron clamping mechanism then held the two rings together so the bottom could not collapse until the entire bottom ring fails - and it ain't yet!.
The bricks then continued in the normal fashion.
So looking down the well I can see the bottom ring and another ring some 3ft higher: yes it's slighty off plumb: its about 35ft deep.

The other system for deeper wells is where you dig down in sections, then build the brickwork up from where you have got to, back filling behind the bricks as you go and then fill in the gap between the top of your current "lift" and the previously done bit above you. Then you have to support the bottom of the brickwork you have just finished while you dig the next 10ft or so section and then build up the next lift of brickwork from there up to join on to you section immediately above. You can usually see on these wells the "bodge" where the sections are joined where the bricks didn;t quite fit in the gap and have to be fashioned to fit. So it appears as rings at intervals down the shaft.
Each "lift" is usually cemented into the strata outide it to help hold it in place as the lift below is dug.

Rarely done on domestic wells but you can significantly improve the yield by digging horizontal adits off the bottom in all directions. This is usually done by knocking in perforated tubes from the bottom out into the strata - and anyway is only done in large diamter "commercial wells".
I suppose the modern equivalent is directional drilling where you start the oil well vertically and gradually change direction as you drill deeper such that at the bottom you are drilling horizontally. This means that if you were in Kuwait all those years ago you can drill horizontally and steal the oil from the Iraqui oil fields(alledgely).....errr well maybe that wasn't such a good idea after all.

 

[CatherineB]

Lovely stuff, Andy!

On further investigation, we now think ours is a rain harvesting cistern, rather than a well. The modern pipe that flows into it comes from the gutters on the 20-year-old garage/annexe building. The older, lower down, hole, presumably come from now-defunct pipes, since the house's pipes and gutters now drain into the main drainage system.

It looks not dissimilar to some of the photos in the attached link, which show a cistern at a house very much of an age with ours; the difference being that ours still contains water, and hasn't been filled in with rubble!

http://www.milesgolding.com/cistern.html

There presumably would originally have been a pump, but I haven't had a chance to question either the previous owner or the neighbours to see if they know any history.

Something to park for now, and maybe investigate when we have the time and energy after this building project is done. :wink:

 

[AMc]

d49xc - thanks that was very interesting and makes a lot of sense. It suggests that what I can see at the bottom is they digging ring thing

CatherineB - we had a fairly complicated system of rainwater storage under the vinery. Collecting rainwater from the roof in a couple of interconnected cisterns which in turn went into a soakaway - but as our house was an old farm house with a 8m x 4m room for growing grapes they must have needed a lot of water!
It would be worth lifting the lid when it's really pouring with rain to find out if any of the pipes are still flowing.
You can get a rebate on your water bill if you can show that all the guttering doesn't go into the sewers. It can also help to understand where your rainwater runs to if you have problems with it.

 

[JoceAndChris]

All most fascinating. I love your illuminated well AMc, and the explanation on well construction was just great.

Catherine - glad you got to the bottom of the mystery! We've got an old rainwater harvesting tank just like the one in your link too - so thanks for that - nice to see another. It's still fully functioning and the rainwater is for all the bathing and loo flushing but I'd like to do as the man in your link did, and pump it out and examine wall condition.