Developing a small Spring?

[CliffordK]

I've been thinking about trying to develop a small spring for watering my yard and garden.



The spring seems to run year-around, and as far as I can tell, the flow seems to be pretty constant at about a half to one GPM. The hill behind my property isn't a very big hill, so I would be leery about trying to get more water than it naturally provides.

The goal is water for the garden. I haven't tried to test the purity of the water (bacteria?)

It isn't a lot of water, but on a 24 hour basis, it would add up to about 1000 gallons which should be a good portion of my yard usage.

The spring comes right out from under an old fir tree stump.

I put the bucket in a year ago so deer and wildlife would have someplace to drink, although there probably were enough pools for them to drink anyway. Other than leaves falling into it, I noticed that my bucket had silted up this spring.

I'd like to run plastic pipe, perhaps 400 feet total, and less than 50 foot rise (I think) to the highest place on my property where I'll put a 500+ Gallon tank.

It should be about 10 feet above most of what will be using it. I guess I could elevate the tank somewhat too.

I'm thinking about a small, 12V or 24V pump, solar/battery powered.

My well is about 200 feet deep, and I can definitely see the charges on my power bill when I'm watering heavily, so I was hoping this would help a bit. Plus being "renewable".

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Q's & Thoughts?

Can I install a surface tank from which I would pull the water, or do I need to go with digging out the actual spring, and dumping in a load of gravel & etc? Do I risk the gravel also silting up? Damaging the spring?

What size of hose to run for maximum flow with minimum energy (for about 1GPM)? 3/4"?

For a surface tank collection tank, I would be able to just scoop it out every once in a while (or could I convince silt to drain out a drain hole?

Summers are dry here. I might be able to store some rain water, depending on the storage tank size, but I wouldn't expect to get a lot of new rain water after mid June. In fact, perhaps it would be best to assume that a large storage tank could just slowly be filled with spring water during the rainy season rather than trying to capture both rain water and spring water.

 

[Western]

When I was a kid, my grandfather had a spring much like yours. He borrowed a backhoe, dug it out maybe 4' deep and approximately 8'x10' square. He ended up getting a bit heavier flow and we used that for all the house and barn water for over 20 years. I do know he encouraged the local water cress, supposedly it helped filter the water, but it was a pain for us kids to thin out each summer, of course we got to swim so it wasn't that bad:laughing: It was covered with wire to keep critters out and tin covered the pump.

You may be pleasantly surprised if you dig out a natural "water hole" then pick out the appropriate water pump for your needs.

BTW, grandfather didn't use a "cistern" pumped straight from
the spring year round and never froze solid in the winter, cistern may. (Northern Arkansas)

 

[whistlepig]

I know a little about this but not that much. I have friends in the hill country of southeast Ohio that live in country that has no city/county water. The drilled wells there are polluted by oil shale. They tap into springs for drinking water. There are people in that area that specialize in tapping into these springs. What I have seen is that the hill spring is tapped in to by digging and tapping in with PCV pipe. This PCV pipe carries the spring water through (2) in ground concrete settling tanks. Then through a filtering system in the house. From the spring to the filters is all done by gravity. After the filter water is then pumped. For drinking water done this way it certainly should be tested. But this is true spring water. About the best that I have ever tasted. And it makes an awesome pot of coffee.

 

[CliffordK]

I was just wanting to use it for irrigation.

I don't know where all the drainfields are, so I would certainly want to get it tested before drinking it.

It sounds like I'm in for a lot of digging at the spring end. My thought of an uphill tank would be that I could slowly fill the tank 24 hrs/day, and then I would have the water on demand. If I put my storage tank on the downhill side, I would need some kind of a 110/220V lift pump (no solar) to get reasonable on demand volume.

Since this is a generally small hill, and this seems to be about 100 feet higher than my well water level, I don't know the aquifer size if I do manage to get higher flow. I don't want to mess with neighbor's wells (or mine) either. Anyway, so the current flow would seem sufficient.

 

[jeff9366]

Perhaps these links to archived threads will help:

Google

I have a "seep", not really wet enough to be called a spring in its present state, I am thinking about improving for irragation too.

GREAT PROJECT.

 

[vtsnowedin]

I have a spring that serves my house and has for 100 years. Fortunatly it is a 110 feet above my house so gravity is all that is needed to get water to the house 900 feet away. The original wooden spring box had rotted to the water line and was letting silt and salamanders into the spring so I improved it a few years ago during the driest part of the summer. I dug a hole 8 ft.X8 ft. as deep as I could, about four feet deep on one side down to the ledge rock that the water comes out from under and six feet deep down to blue hardpan on the rest. I then took a 40 inch perforated aluminum culvert eight foot long and trimmed one end to fit close over the ledge at the point where the water comes out. I stood this upright and backfilled around it with screened 3/4 inch stone all the way up to ground (swamp) level on the outside and covered it with some of the excavated topsoil so the ground slopes away from the stand pipe. Eight inches or so of stone on the inside to seal it from salamanders and installed my 3/4" plastic pipe and strainer on the bottom through a hole in the pipe lower then normal water level. A half sheet of 3/4 plywood on top for a cover to keep the leaves out topped it off. (Humm , about time for a new one of those or a piece of steel.)
The crushed stone acts as a storage tank and the excess flow wells up on the down hill edge of the hole I dug and continues on it's way starting a brook which runs to Long island sound.
I also renewed the interceptor ditch that runs around the spring to catch surface runoff from nearby neighbors fields and deposit it in the brook down stream a few yards. You don't want the taste of freshly spread liquid cow manure running into the top of your spring.
You could do the same and lay a half inch black plastic pipe to your storage tank but if you need irragation water 1000 gallons won't go very far so you might consider a large cistern at the spring that would fill by gravity and could be pumped from when needed.

 

[dave1949]

If you had a cistern at the spring, as vtsnowedin mentioned, you could build a water tank trailer from used plastic barrels or 275 gal. totes that are plumbed together. Fill those from the cistern with a small pto pump, move the trailer to where you want to water and use a gravity drip irrigation system.

That would be an alternative to piping and pumping from the spring to the higher location.

 

[radioman]

Well -- I think you need to dig a hole near the spring so the hole is deep enough to have water reserve and have a large surface area for static pressure. This way you can have a larger pump to pump in a shorter amount of time to get water where you need with less energy. I would make a trench from spring to hole you dug and fill it with 1-2 inch rocks to act as a silt filter. As for pipe, I am leery here, cost and size goes hand in hand - larger size gives you less friction to push more water but smaller is cheaper to setup. There is no point in going small only to get a trickle since its 50 ft pushing up and 400 ft run. I dont know the water friction losses, and I am sure you can find it via google.

 

[forgeblast]

http://www.tractorbynet.com/forums/rural-living/264312-i-have-water-weep.html has some information i found when I was asking about my water weep.

 

[SPIKER]

On my place when I first bought there was a spring in the center of the runoff creek (pond up hill 1/4 mile) is the start of the creek with maybe 300 acres runoff thru my place. The Spring kept the creek WET but not running and I wanted to make a deep(er) hole where it came out of the sandstone. I worked around it with the backhoe and TRIED to make it deeper but the sand stone was too hard. What I did manage to do was to stop the spring from flowing where it was. It decided to start flowing 20 or 30 feet away in a NEW location which happened to then run across my tractor path making a mess. It flowed something similar to yours 1 or 2 GPM all summer and at time more. I ended up digging out it's NEW location and found a OLD 3" Clay Tile that had crushed. So I put in 4" black plastic perforated tile 15' to get it into the creek and put the 3' clay tile /seep spring into it.
With the seep location now farther down creek it also flowed MORE, (tile volume and seep amount?) the 4" plastic tile has been flowing almost year round at closer to 5 GPM for past 4 or 5 years now. At times it is probably flowing 50+ gpm as the 4" tile is half full at a very good flow rate. I used creek gravel to tie the seep & old tile area together and a slight dam of clay. then the trench I cut 3' deep for 15' is filled with creek run gravel with some water also flowing out around it at some times.

there are still seeps in a few areas 100 foot circle around where the original one was but adding the tile fixed at least 2 that have not come back full time. I have one that runs after rains dead center in my path just uphill from my bridge. It happens to pull out oil film on top of it when it flows so I'm thinking it is a typical pressure seep that when wet season comes in it pushes up the seeping oil and out it comes being lighter than the water. Wish I could afford to drill it but there are 2 dry oil wells capped within a 1/4 mile and many working well within a 2 mile radius.

I have kept an eye on the original spring location as well, it stays wet but I can't see any flow coming up from below. It seems to be more or less gravel seep from up hill stream/pond overflow now vs the original spring of bubbling water out from below it once was.

I would say lots of good ideas but be sure to know not all of the time will just digging into one open it up for more flow or easier water catch...

Mark