Flushing sediment question #2

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biel

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As I described in a previous post, we had recently deepened our well and had since been dealing with gray, cloudy water. It has been over three weeks of flushing and there is little improvement. As someone suggested, I have been running 2 hoses and that seems to be making a difference. The thing is, when I run the 2 hoses, the water clears up quite a bit but once I turn the hoses off and the well recovers, the water turns gray again. So far I have been running the 2 hoses for about 3 hours at a time and then turning them off for about an hour. Will the water ever clear up? Should I continue doing what I am doing? I am turning the water off and letting the well recover as I don't want to let the well run dry and risk damaging the pump. My well produces about 7 gpm so I am not sure how long I can run 2 hoses before I run out of water.
Any comments or suggestions? Will my water ever clear or should I be thinking about adding another whole house filter? There is already one installed but it is not helping too much.
 

Ballvalve

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I have a well that makes grey muck, and I pump it all the time at about 100 gallons a day, watering things. [vacant land]

Recently a pipe broke, it pumped down to the pump, shut off on low pressure switch, brought in tons of muck, and took about 20 jogs to get the pump restarted to get the grey out and clear water back again.

I lined the entire well with 4" slotted pvc, as I was getting the intake plugged with rocks. Now I get just the fines, and the pump can clear that, sort of a clay/shale powder. The well makes 2GPM, so when I finally use it will try and pump no more than 1.5 gpm to keep from drawing it down and sucking the powder out of the strata.

Overpumping may be counter productive, try pumping at 3gpm for a week and see if it stays clear.
 

LLigetfa

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Overpumping may be counter productive...

The concept of "overpumping" is to pump at a faster rate than normal so that anything that can be stirred up, will at the faster rate but not at the slower rate. If the well clears at a lower rate, throttling the pump may be an option. I know that if I pumped my well at a higher rate, I would bring up lots of fine sand and clay.

When my well was underproducing and I needed to develop it, I recirculated some of the water back down into the well so as not to suck air. As I got more of the fine sand and clay to clear, the well production went up to the point that I no longer needed to recirculate water. Granted, by then all the mud I ran through the old pump wore it out some so it pumped less unthrottled than the new one could. The new pump is throttled by my micronizer.
 

biel

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The good thing is that I do get clear water after running it for an hour or two. I spoke to the driller again today and he said that it looks like there is some soft rock that is making its way out of the well. He advised me to run the water hard for an hour or so until it runs clear and then let it recover for an hour and repeats. He thinks by moving the water up and down the borehole, whatever soft rock there may be will clear out in a few days. I guess I am going to continue flushing it out. Too bad it is not summer, my lawn would look really nice by now :)
 

Ballvalve

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I would take the contrarian view and not disturb and start a plastic flow of muck from a seam that leads to god knows where.
 
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