How To Clean Sediment Out Of A Well? 2 Practical Methods Tried!
How to clean sediments out of a well? So, just sit back and give a good read throughout this discussion over a cup of coffee. We can guarantee that this will be a valuable investment of your time.
If you are an owner of a well, you should know that prolonged usage of the well will leave it filled with sediments. And eventually, you’ll someday have to clean those sediments out of your well. If you don’t clean your well every year, the water quality will sharply decrease and even become unusable.
So, let’s get to the main topic.
How To Clean Sediment Out Of A Well?
So, we will show you here 2 ways to clean the sediment out of a dug well.
Method-1: Using Irrigation Pump
To clean out extra sediments from the bottom of your well, you are going to need an irrigation pump with at least 90 PSI suction power.
An irrigation pump has two hose pipes attached to it. One tube is for sucking in the water, and another tube lets out the water.
You’re going to dip the irrigation pump’s suction pipe into the wells’ bed. And then, you’ll use the irrigation pump’s power to pull out any existing soft sediments.
Now, how to flush sediment from a well by a pump? Well, to safely flush out the silt and sediments, follow the steps in the correct sequence as we have mentioned below:
1. Preparing The Irrigation Pump
We will grab an irrigation pump in the first step. We recommend getting a gas-powered irrigation pump (electric pumps are risky for beginners to use).
For this procedure, you don’t need to buy an irrigation pump. Just borrow a pump from a friend, or you can ask local shops to lend you an irrigation pump for a few hours.
Or, if borrowing is not an option for you, you can still buy a small pump for yourself. Since the accumulation of a thick layer of silt and sediment in well water after heavy use is a common phenomenon, it’ll come in handy in the future.
2. Dipping The Pumps’ Pipe
Now, go ahead and input the irrigation pumps’ section pipe into the well. For this task, the longer pipe you have, the easier the job will be. So, shove in as much pipe length into the well as possible. As a result, your pipe will eventually hit the well ground.
3. Starting The Engine
At this point, you’ll have to put fuel into the irrigation pump and jump-start its engine. Remember, the pumping out process might take anywhere between 30 -120 minutes. So, it’s better to have extra fuel ready for your pump.
4. Letting The Pumping Start
Once the pump has started pumping out the sudden sediment in well water, it will start pumping out the silts from the well ground.
5. Appearance Of Clean Water
And, after 10 minutes of runtime, you should see clean water coming out of the pumps’ output pipe. After the pump has cleaned out the silts and sediments from the wells’ bed, it will immediately start pumping out fresh water. That is the signal for you to understand that silts and sediments from the dug well have been cleaned.
6. Cleaning The Pump Itself
After the cleaning process is done for the well, your pump will likely be all muddy and dirty. And, the internals of your pump might also get very filthy. Now, seeing the pump dirty with silts, you might think, “how to clean sediment out of a good pump?”. Well, it’s effortless.
Just let the pump engine pump out some clean water, and it’ll clean its internal parts itself. Letting the pumps suck in pristine waters will eventually clean out all the dirt and fills from its internal factors. Then, you can also use the fresh water to clean the outer surface of the pump’s body. That will make it as tidy as it was before.
Method-2: Using a DIY PVC Auger Tool
As the second method of cleaning mud or silt from our well, we’re going to manually clean out the well with our hands (using some DIY tools). Remember, this manual method is only suitable for cleaning silt and mud from wells that don’t have a huge depth. So, we recommend only using this method for wells less than 40 ft deep.
And, in this particular method, we will use a DIY PVC auger (shown in the picture below) to bring out the accumulated mud from the flower bed of the well.
1. Attaching PVC Pipes To The DIY Auger
In this step, we will attach PVC pipes to the DIY auger that we are using. Then, we will keep adding and attaching PVC pipes one after another until the pipeline is longer than the depth of the well.
2. Putting The Auger Head Into The Well
At this point, we will put the whole auger head and the PVC pipe extension into the well. We will keep inserting the pipe and the drill until it hits the lower bed of the well. And, we will further push that PVC pipe downwards so that the auger head is lodged very well into the mud/silt.
3. Twisting The PVC Pipe Extension
Now that the auger head is well lodged into the silt underneath the well, we will twist the PVC pipe extension by our hand so the silts are caught inside the auger head.
4. Pulling The Auger Head Out
After twisting the PVC pipe extension multiple times, we will bring the auger head out of the well
5. cleaning the overhead
Now, we will unload all the mud and silt off the auger head using freshwater. And then, we will repeat the above four steps multiple times until all the silt has been cleaned up from the bed of the well.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Can a well fill with sediment?
It most definitely can. If you don’t know how to remove sediment from well water, the deposits will keep building up over time. As a result, it can fill up most of the well.
For example, if your well is 20m deep, silt and sediment accumulation in its bed can render its depth shorten up to 5 m. And eventually, if you don’t take immediate action, it can fill even the whole depth with sediments.
Can you pour vinegar down a well?
Yes, absolutely. Food grade vinegar is one of the most used well cleaning chemicals. It will disinfect the healthy water after it’s cleaned of extra sediments. But, make sure that the vinegar you are opting to use is a food-grade vinegar product (and not industrial vinegar).
How do you clean sediment out of a well?
You can use irrigation pumps to pump out the silts and sediments from a well. If you want further details on this, follow the steps we have mentioned above. It’s easy to clean out the deposits. The whole process should not take not more than half an hour.
The Bottom Line
To sum it all up, although the steps in the discussion how to clean sediment out of a well? might seem pretty simple to do, they will require your most whole effort. That’s why we recommend consulting a professional plumber before pulling off the task.
Anyway, however you manage to pull off the cleaning job, we implore you to use proper safety gears during the whole process. And finally, we bid you the best of luck.
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