When you can’t water your plants, you can’t feed yourself.
If you’re living off-grid or considering it, you’ve got to dig a well.
Most folks would call up a company and pay through the nose for a well… yet in the past folks used to dig their own wells without cranes, electric or powered bits.
Today there are a few more well-digging options available, some of which are quite ingenious. How can you go about digging your own well?
Here’s some inspiration, starting with a low-tech option from Mexico.
1. Hand-Digging a Shallow Well, Mexican-Style
Got some muscles? Some shovels? A bucket of mortar and some bricks? Well then, get to digging a well!
This is quite a tempting way to dig a well off-grid, though it’s labor-intensive. It’s also a shallow well which means you should filter the water or boil it before drinking. It would be a great irrigation well, however. Just don’t fall in when Lassie isn’t around. If you want to hand-dig a well, this looks like a solid method.
2. Use Heavy Equipment to Dig a Well in a Totally Crazy Way
Now this method of digging a well takes the cake. They start with a piece of concrete piping as a guide, then drop a heavy pipe in as a shovel via a trailer bed, a pulley and a tractor.
Sound confusing? Just watch and savor the redneck ingenuity.
We never would have thought of this method in a hundred years.
3. A Very Clever Hand-Dug Backyard Well
What do you get when you combine Texan ingenuity with a tight budget?
A really clever backyard hand-pumped well that ends up looking cool as heck:
The video is long but the idea is ingenious. Again, it’s a shallow well mostly fit for irrigation – yet with a good Berkey water filter , you’d be all set.
4. Got PVC? Got a Pickup Truck? Got Running Water? Try This Well!
Here’s one of the most popular home well-digging methods. Though it requires running water from elsewhere, it does allow you to dig a quite deep well that would probably be safe for home use.
Borrow your neighbor’s hose, build yourself a clever PVC rig, then start digging!
Learning how to dig a well is probably the toughest part of the job. Make a mistake on the front end and all you’ll have is blisters, a deep hole and possibly some wasted materials.
That said, there’s no better way to learn to dig a well than to experiment and jump in (dig in) with both feet.
Let us know how your well-digging turns out!