Firstly, I hold the utmost respect for this gentleman. He performs excellent professional work and i very talented and honest. I adore his channel. Although I'm not sure if it would have been effective in this specific instance, I think I would have started with a large commercial shop vacuum with a long hose, similar to a pool vacuum hose. I've had some success in extracting rocks and other items from drains with that setup.
When you first dropped that grappling hook down the well, and I heard that clank, like it was hitting stone or concrete, my heart sank. I was like "Don't tell me they were so hateful that they dumped large rocks or concrete down that well to permanently plug it up, just so no one else could ever use it". To me, that's a level of vandalism that should warrant jail time, plus forcing them to pay for drilling a new well for the owner. That's just a level of meanness that I don't have the words to describe. That's almost on a level with what the Romans did to some of their enemies back during the times of the Roman Empire. If they conquered an enemy and didn't keep the land for themselves, to keep their enemies from recovering and living on that land again, they would "salt the earth" so that the land was worthless for growing crops, and literally poison the wells so the water was unfit for human consumption and livestock.
@@h2omechanic I would tell him to fill up the old well and drill a new will at the top of the driveway and then run the pipe to the house and electric to the pump
@@h2omechanic try pouring some Phosphoric acid and trisodium phosphate down the hole - something to chemically dissolve the concrete. I know the phosphoric acid shouldn't be toxic.
Jail time is to simple for this destructive act! The clowns could have poisoned people doing this dumb stuff I call for the return of the cat of 9 tails! Everyone for the rest of these miserable clowns lives will see the scars if they take off they're shirt and know that these scared focks are really big pieces of crap and not want to be associated with these degenerate clowns
Time is money. You hit solid rock or cement. Customer does service work judging by his truck. Punch new well. Do water test. Your a good man attempting to save the day. Enjoy your videos keep it up.
I know you were disappointed. I was too, but I also feel you gave it all you could, given the risks your advice to the gentleman was spot on. Thanks for showing us what you do to clean a well. I'm about to go down that same road with my own foreclosed property purchase. Your techniques will help me, thank you.
Thanks so much for sharing this video. First for your willingness to try to help this man, but also for being willing to show that even the best of intentions don't always give us the results we want. Even still, this was a learning experience for all of us watching. Thanks again!
You feeling and thinking of this Job is like myself and customers vehicles that couldn't be fixed at other shops and I was last hope before giving up to by another vehicle. I know your feeling and it is tough when giving everything to save a person
I retrieved a 13 stage Gould line shaft pump out of a 400 foot deep 12 inch casing by fabricating a tube to fit over the pump with some little pieces of leaf spring welded inside to act as barbs.Then I dropped it hard and it jammed over the outside of the pump
I’m in New England, I bought a foreclosure in Ct, beautiful house, 3 car garage, 5 bedroom, etc, BUT the foreclosured owner was apparently pissed, so the first thing we saw was a one year old Ford F 350, backed into the garage, severing 2 support beams in the garage holding up 3 stories, then after a well inspection it was determined that the well was full of all kinds of rocks, bricks, wood, etc, 400 ft well. So we bought the house, immediately supported the busted garage beams, pulled his truck out, boarded up the house and had a new well drilled, 426’ 13 gal p min, I brought my camper, dogs and guns there. We did a septic tank inspection and apparently he was to stupid to sabotage that, thank god. Afterwards we found out the guy was sent to prison. For other things, lol
Worked in bankruptcy and foreclosure and saw this a few times, folks would dump cement down drains, shut off the heat in winter and let it all freeze, I saw it maybe ten times, eight of which the people actually had some decent equity in the homes that they would have received but nope they dropped the sale value and it all came out of their share.
I had a similar experience with a well attempt recovery after the homeowner ran over his well snapping off the pitless adapter. The well filled with sand and gravel that packed the submersible pump and locked it into the casing that was 4 inch PvC. The pump would move down when pushed but would not come up. The pump was suspended on 1 inch poly pipe. I was able to luckily separate the poly pipe from the top of the pump and push the pump down into the screen that was at a depth of 120 feet. Static water was at 30 feet. Luckily the wires at the old pump came apart at the splicing at the pump. After replacing the pitless adapter we installed a new 1hp F&W pump and were able to provide 20 gpm back into the residence. Spending a whole day and wondering if it was really worth it.
You need to make a clam like a posthole digger with two cables, one to lift and one to close the clam. It needs to fit the pipe snugly then be able to close and lift. good luck.
I was in the water industry for over 30 yrs and I used a mirror to light up things. The mirror was on plywood and the cover folded back over to protect it. Worked great!!!
Thank you for your willingness to help the owner out. Good video. You may want to get a 250 CFM air compressor and blow the debris out. The clanking sounds like they dropped rocks down there.
Well man as a like minded small hvac business owner, sometimes we can't win them all. Like you I'll try to jump in and save folks some money and I have come home empty handed a few times, I will say though that those customers like that usually end up being life long customers and even some of them really good friends.
We had a vaguely similar thing done to us about thirty years ago. We had evicted somebody and they came back to do various kinds of sabotage. One of the problems we had after they left was that I couldn't clear the shower drain with a snake. I had noticed a mirror was missing when we entered the unit. I just thought they stole it, Eventually I connected the missing mirror with the weird clog. I used a wet dry vacuum to suck out the water in the trap and up came the mirror in bits. I learned later that they were seeking vengeance on us because we had thrown their stuff away, but we hadn't thrown it away, we had just taken their stuff out of their unit and stored it. I always kept the tenant's stuff they left behind way longer than I was required to. 30 years later when we sold the apartment building I could still see evidence of the damage they had done to their unit.
Compressed air can also loosen and remove sediment and debris on the bottom of a well also. My kind neighbour failed to maintain their septic system and of course contaminated my dug well. Dept of health came around and inspected their property, shut them down and made an order to have a new dug well installed elsewhere on my property. She was not pleased but she was also cheap.
Just a future idea... Some kind of rod with a tiny hole in the middle, that hold a inflatable rubber and a tiny tube that goes up to fill that rubber with. So you could try to reach under it and put air and pull it up.
If a rig could get over that hole, I would run 1' steel pipe and try blowing air, and if that didn't work, circulating mud while trying to push it through the blockage. Here in CA a new well costs so much that we have had to do stuff like that and its still 1/3 of the cost of a new well in many cases
Well worth a shot, shame it didnt work out. Like you I am wondering what really happened because it sounds like it was a really good well at some point not too long ago.
I made a little contraption in about ten minutes for this kinda stuff....out of a set of post hole diggers I took the handles off an .....well I can't say every thing that's the secret sauce...but it works fantastic....
I had a wildfire burn my property including the well head. Melted the plastic casing off. I tapconned a cover over the top till I got the property cleaned up. When I finally got someone out there to fish the pump off the bottom it was a real problem. The top of the well had fell down and was wedged in the casing. It was a 200 ft well with the burned off top of the well pipe at about the 120 ft level. Ten feet above the water level. Damn. Thankfully my driller was determined. He had been fishing dozens of these burned out wells since it was a huge fire… 1700 homes burned. Hundreds of wells were damaged. He had about dozen different tools. Finally he was able to grasp the brass fittings that had been on top of the well and burned into it. Grabbing the old pipe was easy after that. Pulled up the brand new pump that I just installed a month before the fire, added some pipe and replaced all the above ground equipment. He saved me tens of thousands plus many months waiting until his drilling rig was available. So I would tell you to not give up… there are many different tools available including the pipe spears that you can try. Maybe it was being from Texas - he had all kinds of fishing gear inspired by the oil drillers. They drop drill stem weighing a million pounds and ten thousand feet deap and rescue the well.
I had a hay barn do the same thing to a well that was beside it. Melted into a black glob. We had to fish out the pump as well. Nightmare situations!. As for this Vid, I believe it's solid concrete down the hole
I am still watching the video, but I would think to try a shop vac or 2 with a non collapsible flex hose down the well. If you could grab on to each chunk of trash and bring it back up. You could then hopefully expose enough of the pipe to get it hooked.
Croc Crete expertly removes concrete from drains and pipes by fighting the problem at its core. It attacks concrete by breaking it down to its base element. Have you ever seen this stuf?
It's probably an acid based chemical, and concrete is an alkaline compound; most acids will attack and destroy concrete by going for the alkaline components and destroying the hydrolyzed structure of the concrete that resulted from curing. I personally witnessed what a leaking tank of flouboric acid plating solution did to a concrete floor and the chain hoist that was lying on that floor. It wasn't pretty.
Not there to see it, but could you have used a grapple to get some of those rocks/trash off the top, or maybe a vacuum? I have had luck with long hose and a shop vac pulling pieces out of a whole with a vacuum. Also the grapple idea was because you had the camera to use as a guide.
Looking at what has been found, that looks like bits of Concrete and Rocks .... No Chance .... Thanks for your Great vidclips .... Best to All from ChCh, New Zealand
maybe they did and it's not been discovered yet! hopefully no, but a new well and/or surrounding areas will find out soon enough I guess. I'd for sure have the water tested there and surrounding areas for a long ways.
I wonder if some sticks of 1/2 inch steel pipe with a a grapple points,they would have to be floating and could be droped down next to the cammera to go in side the pipe and use the pvc pipe to pull some of the debris out with the pump.
A pionjar drill would have been really handy for this job. 35' is nothing to it and the bits are small enough to at least get samples of the obstruction. My geologist father used them all the time to get rock core samples.
Fishing is a crap shoot! In oil & gas, fishing is a) an art form unto itself, and b) a great way to piss away millions of dollars and STILL lose a well. But we try because sometimes we get lucky. Sucks every time! Good on you for trying and being straight up with the guy.
Our neighbor's house was forclosed. I had thought about buying it and did a home inspection, but there were too many issues. Prior to the inspection I turned on the faucet for the kitchen sink and it was stopped up. Someone else bought the house and they found cement inside the drain and many other issues.
That is a popular thing to do with rental evictions. My friend, a good-hearted soul in a community of slumlords, tries to provide homes that he would live in himself. They reward him by not paying, then when he is finally forced to evict them, they vandalize the places in every way they can. This happens over and over. I can see why some landlords won't maintain the properties. Some people deserve no better than to live in the mess they create. These are the people who will wreck your wells.
My parents have had several wells drilled in Oregon during the last 50 years on different properties. The driller ALWAYS used heavy 6 inch diameter steel casing. Why would anyone put in a pvc casing? That seems crazy.
@@jfbeamBut it doesn't work fine? Maybe if you can just set it in and grout it. But if you gotta drive it you need steel. And up my way you always gotta drive it.
40 years ago saw the front of a drilling rig propped up 4 or 5 feet on timbers in - of all places - Queens, NYC! They were deepening an existing well for Jamaica Water Company. Have no idea if they still exist or have switched over to NYC water.
Like the man said “you don’t know what you don’t know “. Who’s responsible for this damage,why who ever did this,did they do this? Some people are just despicable, and while it may not be (Christian like) one can only hope that they will be judged accordingly,for their actions.🙏 At any rate thanks for your attempt at saving this well, and sharing it with us.
They blocked it a few feet and then put bags of cement is my guess. The homeowner seems handy why doesn’t he get 30 ft of the drill extensions with set key and a concrete drill bit and see if he can drill a small whole through might be 200$ in extensions but still cheaper then a well or dig a 30 ft deep ramp and cut it
Bumps and holes are par for some of those "back woods" dirt roads. The gravel road from the highway to my grand parent's farm in Missouri wasn't too bad, but some of the lesser traveled dirt roads my grandfather would take my sister and myself with the car, were probably best traveled with an old John Deere "hand fly-wheel" start tractor! ;)
Have you ever thought of using a wire spring like plumbers use to clear drains? Narrow at one end and spirals out to 5 or 6 inches? Spin it at the debris and try to catch it in the coils of the spring to then pull it up?
@@williamnixon3994 those same people probably claim to be morally superior and justify their actions through oddball and counterproductive rationals. I'm sad for our world at the current moment.
taper tap or overshot might be worth a shot. i work on commercial pumps, mainly turbines all day, everyday. Might be worth trying to see if you can get 1/2" or 3/4" pipe past I.t and blow some air down. might free something up downhole and get some water moving. never a good day when you have to go fishing in the water well world.
So i know this is months later, but im just wondering why after trying to punch the well, you didn't send the camera back down to confirm if they'd concreted the pump in? Maybe the video evidence could have been used in the prosecution of the former tenants?
A better tool for retrieving a pump is to use a 3 foot section of pipe 2.5 - 4 inch diameter, cut some tabs in the side then push the top of the tabs in. This way the tool slides over the drop pipe using your pump hoist and grabs the outside of the pump pipe. Then just pull it up.
Hubby is a retired plumber. He said a tenant once trashed the plumbing by dumping gravel down the toilet. What a mess! Another time they put the camera down the line and found nails and other things that don't have ANY reason to be in a sewer line. I guess I just don't understand the mindset of someone who would do that kind of thing.
That is just heinous . Worked on a few wells in my life , and it is hard enough work without some POS deliberately sabotaging one . Hateful don't hardly describe it .
one the vary first dropped that grappling hook down the well it sounds like concrete to me. i feel you did the best you can do it is time to punch a new hole. like you say there is no safe way to get a rig set up to try and drill it out with out blowing it out the side. this is a awesome video.
My neighbors who were decent people lost the house they bought because of wells Fargo B.S.several years back they paid for years .Anyways when the last day came he came over said he was leaving house and garage open I could have anything that was leftover .well I went inside and they had a beautifull ream colered carpeted staircase they laid cherry Popsicles each stairtread to melt .left the water running didn't flush toilets etc.
Win some, Lose some. But you LEARNED some too. Do you have a grabbing tool that could grab hold of the smaller pieces of rock in the casing? Similar to a mechanic's tool for picking up dropped nuts and bolts ?
I have a weird take on this stuff. Because life as we know it depends on water availability, I have always thought if a well as sort of sacred. I guess it's from my upbringing. My dad taught me that the most important thing on a property is the well. I think sabotaging a well should be a criminal offense.
It probably wouldn't have helped here, but I started with magnet fishing.. A strong magnet on a rope. And then a grappler like the carnival grappler games. And if it is grit, a strong shop vac. But to be honest: The spear sounded like impacting concrete on the video. Not sure if that was true to reality.
As for the site location, I've seen worse. But the drive way is an easy fix. About two tons of gravel to ease the transition from the main road. This looks like the foothills of North Carolina. Right before you get into the Appalachian Mountains. I'd also question runoff from rain. Doesn't look like there is any culverts to direct rain water and the way this lot is associated, that run off from the road looks like it is headed straight for the foundation of that home. Whoever the current owner is needs to look at their water management The drive way isn't even graveled to help prevent wash outs. And the more people drive onto the drive way, the more the road gets warn down so that it creates a more natural decline. After a heavy rain, water is just going to be gushing down this lot driveway. At around 3:45 you can already see that the drive way near the pump and directly in front of the house is starting to wash out already.
Same thing happened to my buddies will for some reason 2K senior something gave up in it and we couldn't pull the pump he ended up spending the money to get a new well drilled and then we just bought a off-the-shelf pump from Tractor Supply and it's full of iron which turns to rust so now is complete water system smells like iron oxide basically smells like a sewage
@@wisco53520 I was just kind of wondering if it would be possible to waterjet out the plug but I imagine by the time you get the hydrovac guy out there and pay for someone to come all the way out there you might as well drill a new well
too deep for most anything but drilling and if they used some large rock, with wadding and hydraulic cement. it may break things. then who knows what toxic things they could have put down there. I'd be afraid it's contaminated, not to mention possibly contaminated the surrounding aquifers. may drill a new well hundreds of feet away and get something nasty. or even neighbors way down the road can be effected. 🤬 idiots they were.
@@throttlebottle5906 Tha was one of the frist things that comes into my mind after ther first "clunk". When someone is pouring concrete or something like this down there, than there could be many, way more nasty things there.
@@MermaidSystem yeah, just powdered or wet concrete would by itself would go right straight to the bottom, with some maybe stopping on a ledge at end of casing. so they had to have blocked it somehow further up. hard to say a camera scope would have been neat to see down there with!
If I was gonna guess, it would be the pump has been stolen, the pvc jammed back down having been cut at the water mark and rapid set dropped down in paper or plastic bags. Devious and difficult.
I'm very surprised you don't have an auger that is sized to fit the ID of the steel and PVC casings . Most home owners have no clue about how their well water and pump system works. When I was 12 I was installing and removing our pump system at our summer cottage. Winter is a bitch in Canada. But I didn't have one of those mickey mouse bladder tanks. I had a 60 Imperial gallon pressure vessel which was filled about 1/3 of the way up and drained from the bottom and built a head of air pressure above the water in the tank with a sight glass indicating the level of water. The cottage was purchased in 1954 (pump was there.) and the Goulds pump is in my garage and is in perfect working order. I prefer a tiled shallow well, but if you must drill I prefer a casing as large as I can get.
I mite not fully understand the concept but I wonder why you did not fill the pipe with water to the top if it stays drill another if the water goes down then figure out what the next step is
Its always nice to see someone willing to take a shot at the difficult jobs no one else want to attempt.
Firstly, I hold the utmost respect for this gentleman. He performs excellent professional work and i very talented and honest. I adore his channel. Although I'm not sure if it would have been effective in this specific instance, I think I would have started with a large commercial shop vacuum with a long hose, similar to a pool vacuum hose. I've had some success in extracting rocks and other items from drains with that setup.
Truly the unspoken heros we didnt know we needed!
Thank you good sir for your impeccable service to the community.
Less than two minutes into this video I already like this guy
All his videos are addictive .
Appears that they just didn't try to ruin the well but were quite successful at the endeavor.
When you first dropped that grappling hook down the well, and I heard that clank, like it was hitting stone or concrete, my heart sank. I was like "Don't tell me they were so hateful that they dumped large rocks or concrete down that well to permanently plug it up, just so no one else could ever use it".
To me, that's a level of vandalism that should warrant jail time, plus forcing them to pay for drilling a new well for the owner. That's just a level of meanness that I don't have the words to describe.
That's almost on a level with what the Romans did to some of their enemies back during the times of the Roman Empire. If they conquered an enemy and didn't keep the land for themselves, to keep their enemies from recovering and living on that land again, they would "salt the earth" so that the land was worthless for growing crops, and literally poison the wells so the water was unfit for human consumption and livestock.
You & me both!
Big air compressor blow it out that is what I have done several times with my company
@@h2omechanic I would tell him to fill up the old well and drill a new will at the top of the driveway and then run the pipe to the house and electric to the pump
@@h2omechanic try pouring some Phosphoric acid and trisodium phosphate down the hole - something to chemically dissolve the concrete. I know the phosphoric acid shouldn't be toxic.
Jail time is to simple for this destructive act! The clowns could have poisoned people doing this dumb stuff I call for the return of the cat of 9 tails! Everyone for the rest of these miserable clowns lives will see the scars if they take off they're shirt and know that these scared focks are really big pieces of crap and not want to be associated with these degenerate clowns
Time is money. You hit solid rock or cement. Customer does service work judging by his truck. Punch new well. Do water test. Your a good man attempting to save the day. Enjoy your videos keep it up.
I know you were disappointed. I was too, but I also feel you gave it all you could, given the risks your advice to the gentleman was spot on. Thanks for showing us what you do to clean a well. I'm about to go down that same road with my own foreclosed property purchase. Your techniques will help me, thank you.
Thanks so much for sharing this video. First for your willingness to try to help this man, but also for being willing to show that even the best of intentions don't always give us the results we want. Even still, this was a learning experience for all of us watching. Thanks again!
You feeling and thinking of this Job is like myself and customers vehicles that couldn't be fixed at other shops and I was last hope before giving up to by another vehicle. I know your feeling and it is tough when giving everything to save a person
I retrieved a 13 stage Gould line shaft pump out of a 400 foot deep 12 inch casing by fabricating a tube to fit over the pump with some little pieces of leaf spring welded inside to act as barbs.Then I dropped it hard and it jammed over the outside of the pump
I’m in New England, I bought a foreclosure in Ct, beautiful house, 3 car garage, 5 bedroom, etc, BUT the foreclosured owner was apparently pissed, so the first thing we saw was a one year old Ford F 350, backed into the garage, severing 2 support beams in the garage holding up 3 stories, then after a well inspection it was determined that the well was full of all kinds of rocks, bricks, wood, etc, 400 ft well. So we bought the house, immediately supported the busted garage beams, pulled his truck out, boarded up the house and had a new well drilled, 426’ 13 gal p min, I brought my camper, dogs and guns there. We did a septic tank inspection and apparently he was to stupid to sabotage that, thank god. Afterwards we found out the guy was sent to prison. For other things, lol
Worked in bankruptcy and foreclosure and saw this a few times, folks would dump cement down drains, shut off the heat in winter and let it all freeze, I saw it maybe ten times, eight of which the people actually had some decent equity in the homes that they would have received but nope they dropped the sale value and it all came out of their share.
I had a similar experience with a well attempt recovery after the homeowner ran over his well snapping off the pitless adapter. The well filled with sand and gravel that packed the submersible pump and locked it into the casing that was 4 inch PvC. The pump would move down when pushed but would not come up. The pump was suspended on 1 inch poly pipe. I was able to luckily separate the poly pipe from the top of the pump and push the pump down into the screen that was at a depth of 120 feet. Static water was at 30 feet. Luckily the wires at the old pump came apart at the splicing at the pump. After replacing the pitless adapter we installed a new 1hp F&W pump and were able to provide 20 gpm back into the residence. Spending a whole day and wondering if it was really worth it.
You need to make a clam like a posthole digger with two cables, one to lift and one to close the clam. It needs to fit the pipe snugly then be able to close and lift. good luck.
Yup he’s definitely a solid guy, it’s refreshing. I’ve been watching several of his videos, and he always tries to do the right thing..
I was in the water industry for over 30 yrs and I used a mirror to light up things. The mirror was on plywood and the cover folded back over to protect it. Worked great!!!
On much shorter pipes, I've had good luck with a shop vacuum to capture lighter stuff. If it's steel, perhaps a fishing magnet would be of use.
I came here to comment this. I wonder if a shop vac would take out the grit as well.
Thank you for your willingness to help the owner out. Good video. You may want to get a 250 CFM air compressor and blow the debris out. The clanking sounds like they dropped rocks down there.
Well man as a like minded small hvac business owner, sometimes we can't win them all. Like you I'll try to jump in and save folks some money and I have come home empty handed a few times, I will say though that those customers like that usually end up being life long customers and even some of them really good friends.
We had a vaguely similar thing done to us about thirty years ago. We had evicted somebody and they came back to do various kinds of sabotage. One of the problems we had after they left was that I couldn't clear the shower drain with a snake. I had noticed a mirror was missing when we entered the unit. I just thought they stole it, Eventually I connected the missing mirror with the weird clog. I used a wet dry vacuum to suck out the water in the trap and up came the mirror in bits. I learned later that they were seeking vengeance on us because we had thrown their stuff away, but we hadn't thrown it away, we had just taken their stuff out of their unit and stored it. I always kept the tenant's stuff they left behind way longer than I was required to. 30 years later when we sold the apartment building I could still see evidence of the damage they had done to their unit.
30 years and you couldn't fix the place, typical landlord
Compressed air can also loosen and remove sediment and debris on the bottom of a well also.
My kind neighbour failed to maintain their septic system and of course contaminated my dug well. Dept of health came around and inspected their property, shut them down and made an order to have a new dug well installed elsewhere on my property. She was not pleased but she was also cheap.
Note to self: If buying properly or not home with well water check the well to make sure it's in working order before deciding to buy.
Just a future idea... Some kind of rod with a tiny hole in the middle, that hold a inflatable rubber and a tiny tube that goes up to fill that rubber with. So you could try to reach under it and put air and pull it up.
If a rig could get over that hole, I would run 1' steel pipe and try blowing air, and if that didn't work, circulating mud while trying to push it through the blockage. Here in CA a new well costs so much that we have had to do stuff like that and its still 1/3 of the cost of a new well in many cases
Definitely more cost-effective and money ahead to just drill a new well.👍
Well worth a shot, shame it didnt work out. Like you I am wondering what really happened because it sounds like it was a really good well at some point not too long ago.
A very interesting story on things that can go "sideways",so to speak
That’s too bad. I applaud you for trying. Some people, previous owners, suck. Assuming it was them.
Call the law. If damage to the aquifer is traced to that well and was unreported. Your new best friend ( not ) is the EPA.
This is a well someone “closed” for good reason like non payment of services/drilling. Glad you walked away cuz that job is sketchy to say the least.
I'm not sure if you need schedule 80 for a well that deep.
The PVC looks like a very thin wall.
I made a little contraption in about ten minutes for this kinda stuff....out of a set of post hole diggers I took the handles off an .....well I can't say every thing that's the secret sauce...but it works fantastic....
I had a wildfire burn my property including the well head. Melted the plastic casing off. I tapconned a cover over the top till I got the property cleaned up. When I finally got someone out there to fish the pump off the bottom it was a real problem. The top of the well had fell down and was wedged in the casing. It was a 200 ft well with the burned off top of the well pipe at about the 120 ft level. Ten feet above the water level. Damn.
Thankfully my driller was determined. He had been fishing dozens of these burned out wells since it was a huge fire… 1700 homes burned. Hundreds of wells were damaged. He had about dozen different tools. Finally he was able to grasp the brass fittings that had been on top of the well and burned into it. Grabbing the old pipe was easy after that. Pulled up the brand new pump that I just installed a month before the fire, added some pipe and replaced all the above ground equipment. He saved me tens of thousands plus many months waiting until his drilling rig was available.
So I would tell you to not give up… there are many different tools available including the pipe spears that you can try. Maybe it was being from Texas - he had all kinds of fishing gear inspired by the oil drillers. They drop drill stem weighing a million pounds and ten thousand feet deap and rescue the well.
I had a hay barn do the same thing to a well that was beside it. Melted into a black glob. We had to fish out the pump as well. Nightmare situations!.
As for this Vid, I believe it's solid concrete down the hole
this type of sabotage happened a lot after the GFC in 2008.
Bummer.🙁 Nice try helping the guy out.👍
Thought this was going to have a happy ending. Oh WELL, can't win 'em all.
Thanks for the videos, well done and really educational!
I am still watching the video, but I would think to try a shop vac or 2 with a non collapsible flex hose down the well. If you could grab on to each chunk of trash and bring it back up. You could then hopefully expose enough of the pipe to get it hooked.
Croc Crete expertly removes concrete from drains and pipes by fighting the problem at its core. It attacks concrete by breaking it down to its base element. Have you ever seen this stuf?
It's probably an acid based chemical, and concrete is an alkaline compound; most acids will attack and destroy concrete by going for the alkaline components and destroying the hydrolyzed structure of the concrete that resulted from curing. I personally witnessed what a leaking tank of flouboric acid plating solution did to a concrete floor and the chain hoist that was lying on that floor. It wasn't pretty.
Not there to see it, but could you have used a grapple to get some of those rocks/trash off the top, or maybe a vacuum? I have had luck with long hose and a shop vac pulling pieces out of a whole with a vacuum. Also the grapple idea was because you had the camera to use as a guide.
Another informative video. Outstanding! God Bless!
the hook sounds like they put rocks or concrete down the well
Looking at what has been found, that looks like bits of Concrete and Rocks .... No Chance .... Thanks for your Great vidclips .... Best to All from ChCh, New Zealand
It's not just the debris the threw in the well, did they throw poison or other chemicals in there too
People are terrible sometimes. They could easily have contaminated the aquifer and rendered it unusable for everyone. Disgusting!
maybe they did and it's not been discovered yet! hopefully no, but a new well and/or surrounding areas will find out soon enough I guess.
I'd for sure have the water tested there and surrounding areas for a long ways.
Sometimes?? Seems like all the time these days
These are the types of people who simply don't care how many people they mess things up for in order to get their little emotional payoff.
How about a hydro AC. Basically a giant shop vac. It can have small hose attached and you can use a power washer which is usually on the unit
You're a good man! Always give it a shot!
I wonder if some sticks of 1/2 inch steel pipe with a a grapple points,they would have to be floating and could be droped down next to the cammera to go in side the pipe and use the pvc pipe to pull some of the debris out with the pump.
A pionjar drill would have been really handy for this job. 35' is nothing to it and the bits are small enough to at least get samples of the obstruction. My geologist father used them all the time to get rock core samples.
Fishing is a crap shoot! In oil & gas, fishing is a) an art form unto itself, and b) a great way to piss away millions of dollars and STILL lose a well. But we try because sometimes we get lucky. Sucks every time! Good on you for trying and being straight up with the guy.
Our neighbor's house was forclosed. I had thought about buying it and did a home inspection, but there were too many issues. Prior to the inspection I turned on the faucet for the kitchen sink and it was stopped up. Someone else bought the house and they found cement inside the drain and many other issues.
That is a popular thing to do with rental evictions. My friend, a good-hearted soul in a community of slumlords, tries to provide homes that he would live in himself. They reward him by not paying, then when he is finally forced to evict them, they vandalize the places in every way they can. This happens over and over. I can see why some landlords won't maintain the properties. Some people deserve no better than to live in the mess they create. These are the people who will wreck your wells.
My parents have had several wells drilled in Oregon during the last 50 years on different properties. The driller ALWAYS used heavy 6 inch diameter steel casing. Why would anyone put in a pvc casing? That seems crazy.
Because it's cheap and works just fine. (same reason almost all plumbing is PVC these days.)
@@jfbeamBut it doesn't work fine? Maybe if you can just set it in and grout it. But if you gotta drive it you need steel. And up my way you always gotta drive it.
That’s the way cheapskates do things!
The trash is the broken supply pipe.
40 years ago saw the front of a drilling rig propped up 4 or 5 feet on timbers in - of all places - Queens, NYC! They were deepening an existing well for Jamaica Water Company. Have no idea if they still exist or have switched over to NYC water.
i like your work mate
It kind of looked like chunks of broken well casing but who knows ?
Like the man said “you don’t know what you don’t know “. Who’s responsible for this damage,why who ever did this,did they do this? Some people are just despicable, and while it may not be (Christian like) one can only hope that they will be judged accordingly,for their actions.🙏 At any rate thanks for your attempt at saving this well, and sharing it with us.
They blocked it a few feet and then put bags of cement is my guess. The homeowner seems handy why doesn’t he get 30 ft of the drill extensions with set key and a concrete drill bit and see if he can drill a small whole through might be 200$ in extensions but still cheaper then a well or dig a 30 ft deep ramp and cut it
I'm new to this channel and have been really enjoying your content. My question here is how did they drill this well in the first place?
Bumps and holes are par for some of those "back woods" dirt roads. The gravel road from the highway to my grand parent's farm in Missouri wasn't too bad, but some of the lesser traveled dirt roads my grandfather would take my sister and myself with the car, were probably best traveled with an old John Deere "hand fly-wheel" start tractor! ;)
Full of rocks?
Have you ever thought of using a wire spring like plumbers use to clear drains? Narrow at one end and spirals out to 5 or 6 inches? Spin it at the debris and try to catch it in the coils of the spring to then pull it up?
By the clanging sound the grapple made, it sounds like they plugged the well with concrete before they threw the trash on top of it.
People don't really understand how their wells are connected and how bad trash in a well can actually be.
The people who trashed it didn't care in the first place
@@williamnixon3994 those same people probably claim to be morally superior and justify their actions through oddball and counterproductive rationals.
I'm sad for our world at the current moment.
taper tap or overshot might be worth a shot. i work on commercial pumps, mainly turbines all day, everyday. Might be worth trying to see if you can get 1/2" or 3/4" pipe past I.t and blow some air down. might free something up downhole and get some water moving. never a good day when you have to go fishing in the water well world.
Since it was bought at foreclosure i wonder if it was sold "as is, where is".
I was thinking a 30 foot dig with a long arm excavator would cost less than drilling a new well. Was that not an option?
So i know this is months later, but im just wondering why after trying to punch the well, you didn't send the camera back down to confirm if they'd concreted the pump in? Maybe the video evidence could have been used in the prosecution of the former tenants?
Pointless. You can't prove they did it.
Thanks for sharing
Do you ever use a vacuum truck to get silt out of wells?
A better tool for retrieving a pump is to use a 3 foot section of pipe 2.5 - 4 inch diameter, cut some tabs in the side then push the top of the tabs in. This way the tool slides over the drop pipe using your pump hoist and grabs the outside of the pump pipe. Then just pull it up.
Use a Cable Tool. That's what PaP and I always used for all of anything well related.
You must be running a rotary drilling rig.
Sunday sun comes shining down on me!
If they could prove who did it I'd think the state would be interested. I'm sure it would be really hard to prove though.
Hubby is a retired plumber. He said a tenant once trashed the plumbing by dumping gravel down the toilet. What a mess! Another time they put the camera down the line and found nails and other things that don't have ANY reason to be in a sewer line. I guess I just don't understand the mindset of someone who would do that kind of thing.
Is there no way to grab that casing and slowly pull it up without breaking it? Remove the grouting first or as it comes up?
I wonder how that situation turned out in the end?
That is just heinous .
Worked on a few wells in my life , and it is hard enough work without some POS deliberately sabotaging one .
Hateful don't hardly describe it .
Heavy duty magnet
one the vary first dropped that grappling hook down the well it sounds like concrete to me.
i feel you did the best you can do it is time to punch a new hole.
like you say there is no safe way to get a rig set up to try and drill it out with out blowing it out the side.
this is a awesome video.
What size pump do you run on the deck engine? Do you have specs/ part numbers for it?
My neighbors who were decent people lost the house they bought because of wells Fargo B.S.several years back they paid for years .Anyways when the last day came he came over said he was leaving house and garage open I could have anything that was leftover .well I went inside and they had a beautifull ream colered carpeted staircase they laid cherry Popsicles each stairtread to melt .left the water running didn't flush toilets etc.
Win some, Lose some. But you LEARNED some too. Do you have a grabbing tool that could grab hold of the smaller pieces of rock in the casing? Similar to a mechanic's tool for picking up dropped nuts and bolts ?
I built my own drill bit to drill a well
I have a weird take on this stuff. Because life as we know it depends on water availability, I have always thought if a well as sort of sacred. I guess it's from my upbringing. My dad taught me that the most important thing on a property is the well. I think sabotaging a well should be a criminal offense.
I saw a well driller one time took a mirror and shined down the well where a flash light wouldn't show you any thing
It probably wouldn't have helped here, but I started with magnet fishing.. A strong magnet on a rope. And then a grappler like the carnival grappler games. And if it is grit, a strong shop vac. But to be honest: The spear sounded like impacting concrete on the video. Not sure if that was true to reality.
As for the site location, I've seen worse. But the drive way is an easy fix. About two tons of gravel to ease the transition from the main road. This looks like the foothills of North Carolina. Right before you get into the Appalachian Mountains. I'd also question runoff from rain. Doesn't look like there is any culverts to direct rain water and the way this lot is associated, that run off from the road looks like it is headed straight for the foundation of that home. Whoever the current owner is needs to look at their water management The drive way isn't even graveled to help prevent wash outs. And the more people drive onto the drive way, the more the road gets warn down so that it creates a more natural decline. After a heavy rain, water is just going to be gushing down this lot driveway. At around 3:45 you can already see that the drive way near the pump and directly in front of the house is starting to wash out already.
Same thing happened to my buddies will for some reason 2K senior something gave up in it and we couldn't pull the pump he ended up spending the money to get a new well drilled and then we just bought a off-the-shelf pump from Tractor Supply and it's full of iron which turns to rust so now is complete water system smells like iron oxide basically smells like a sewage
He will have to invest in some major filtration.
The “trash” was pieces of plastic pipe
I'm assuming it's impossible to get a vac truck to suck from that far down
Vac truck with vane pump will pull 21' max. Probably worth a shot though.
@@wisco53520 I was just kind of wondering if it would be possible to waterjet out the plug but I imagine by the time you get the hydrovac guy out there and pay for someone to come all the way out there you might as well drill a new well
too deep for most anything but drilling and if they used some large rock, with wadding and hydraulic cement. it may break things. then who knows what toxic things they could have put down there. I'd be afraid it's contaminated, not to mention possibly contaminated the surrounding aquifers. may drill a new well hundreds of feet away and get something nasty. or even neighbors way down the road can be effected. 🤬 idiots they were.
@@throttlebottle5906 Tha was one of the frist things that comes into my mind after ther first "clunk". When someone is pouring concrete or something like this down there, than there could be many, way more nasty things there.
@@MermaidSystem yeah, just powdered or wet concrete would by itself would go right straight to the bottom, with some maybe stopping on a ledge at end of casing. so they had to have blocked it somehow further up. hard to say a camera scope would have been neat to see down there with!
Ok I see you got a cable tool it can work it
nice way to end it " oh well "
Awwe poor homielicious had a bad day
Is there a follow up on this vid
Love your last comment Oh well
Wouldn’t a large heavy magnet on a rope work the type they use to attach antennas to car rooftops. Or a vacuum pump and try and suck it out.
If I was gonna guess, it would be the pump has been stolen, the pvc jammed back down having been cut at the water mark and rapid set dropped down in paper or plastic bags. Devious and difficult.
Hydrostatic baler might work
That angle is Childs Play in the mountains. 😅
Question, could the liner not be pulled up and out? Then replaced?
The casing, no. It's locked in tight
I'm very surprised you don't have an auger that is sized to fit the ID of the steel and PVC casings . Most home owners have no clue about how their well water and pump system works. When I was 12 I was installing and removing our pump system at our summer cottage. Winter is a bitch in Canada. But I didn't have one of those mickey mouse bladder tanks. I had a 60 Imperial gallon pressure vessel which was filled about 1/3 of the way up and drained from the bottom and built a head of air pressure above the water in the tank with a sight glass indicating the level of water. The cottage was purchased in 1954 (pump was there.) and the Goulds pump is in my garage and is in perfect working order.
I prefer a tiled shallow well, but if you must drill I prefer a casing as large as I can get.
I mite not fully understand the concept but I wonder why you did not fill the pipe with water to the top if it stays drill another if the water goes down then figure out what the next step is
at least you gave it a good try......