I thought I had posted a picture of the pump daughter Jaime and I put on her well. I can’t find it now, so maybe I remember sharing it with people at work.

The back story is that last May she had a well drilled on her property in Idaho (she currently lives about 45 minutes southeast of Seattle). As it typical she stressed some about finding water. She bought the property without knowing for certain there would be water. All the neighbors have good wells without going too deep. But that didn’t mean she would find water.

She called and gave me updates as they started drilling, they were down 100′ and there was nothing. None of the neighbors had to go below about 150′. They were below 150′ and still nothing. She wanted to know if she should have them drill in a different place on the property. “Keep going for a while longer. That isn’t really that deep yet.”

It wasn’t too much longer before she called back. I could tell from the tone of her voice it was good news. “Guess how many gallons per minute they have!”, she demanded. “80?”, I replied. I knew it was up there from the excitement in her voice. “100!”, she crowed. She went on to say they hit water at 220 feet, drilled to 240 feet, and the driller said it is an artesian well. I always thought an artesian well is when the water comes completely out of the ground. But apparently that is not the definition. The water was five feet below the surface.

Nice!

Sometime later, probably about July or August she wanted to talk about the well again. Since she doesn’t have electricity on the property yet, she asked if we could put a hand pump in and she could have water to irrigate a few trees. At five feet below the surface, it would be trivial to pull that water on up and fill buckets with a hand pump. So, we put a pitcher pump in with a ten-foot-long pipe and she had consumable water.

Recently she started talking to a local architect who went out to the property to look at the lay of the land, etc. and reported the pump was leaking water. What? Really? Yup. He sent her a picture.

Ten days ago, I visited to see it for myself:

I have never seen anything like this before. That’s awesome!