Well is a mess

[smith887]

Hey everyone,

I'm not very knowledgeable about wells and am looking for possibly some information about them or even someone to tell me what is wrong with it. So just to give you some information on my situation I'll start off with that my boyfriend received a house from his mother that she had been renting out previously. His step father, who likes to think of him self as a carpenter, plumber and electrician, had done a bunch of things to the house probably about 5 to 7 years ago. One of the things he did was change the well piping around. From talking with people who know some things about our well I have found out that it is a deep well and runs down between 40 to 60 feet into the ground. I am certain that the water table is high enough that it isn't a case of our well drying up. So anyways back to the well, it has this horrible habit of splurting quite a bit, I would almost say that there is more air in the pipes than there is water and fairly frequently it loses water pressure all together and the pump has to be primed. We had my boyfriends dad come over one day to look at it as he used to live here before the step father changed things around and he informed us that there should be two pipes leading into the ground and said something about a jet at the bottom, I didn't really understand what he meant about the jet until I was watching videos today and saw one where a guy had pulled his pipes up and was showing the old jet and new jet. Well the step father had cut one of the pipes going into the ground. I noticed in the spring when the water was very high that if the cut pipe is under water we have constant good water pressure and no air bubbles. Also when we have spoken to my boyfriends mother about the well all she says is that she doesn't know anything about the second pipe or why her husband cut it and that when he pulled the pipes before it was to change the foot valve(?). The only thing I have found on the internet about foot valves so far has to do with the pipe going into the water pump so I don't know what that means. Also we are pretty sure that it isn't the pressure tank because I was looking in the well one day and noticed you could see air bubbles passing past the elbow joint at the top of the well. So any information or help anyone can give me would be really appreciated, we just really want to figure out what is going on with the well before we decide to do anything with it whether it be call a plumber or try to fix it ourselves. Thank you

* I'm also going to post a photo

[valveman]

It doesn’t matter how deep the well is. But if the water level is deeper than 24’, the single pipe jet pump won’t work. Pulling too hard trying to lift the water is probably where the air is coming from. Using two pipes with the jet down the well is needed to lift water from deeper than 24’.