entire smelly well saga and current situation

Five foot from the bottom is to close, and the pump should be matched to how much water the well can produce, you don't want to suck it dry and mix it all up in there often.

Want to thank you for your willingness to post this saga, too. Good education for many of us.

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Alice
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"No great thing is created suddenly." ~Epictitus

Bentonite, clay, will take possibly take days to settle into the bottom of the well. If you can get a sample of bentonite, try it in a bucket of water drawn from the well that has the sulfur smell. It's often used to prevent seepage from ponds that lose water. I'm not sure it will block inflow into the well. Depending on the hydrostatic pressure where the water flows into the well, it may just stir the clay up.

The fact your well recharges slowly means the flow may not be enough to disturb the clay. Cement will block the flow from the shale. Bentonite swells a lot as it absorbs water. If you take the same dry volumes of cement and bentonite, the bentonite will fill up to 15 times the volume that cement will.

BTW, bentonite has been used to plug an abandoned well. Be careful.

Just google the word 'shale' together with the words 'hydrogen sulfide' and you'll find that shale can be a common source of the compound hydrogen sulfide. Hydrogen sulfide is the "rotten egg" smell. Shale can also a common source of natural gas and crude oil. If the shale your well is finished in is the source of your rotten egg smell, no amount of bleaching is going to stop it. The only fix is to seal the bottom portion of your well - the portion that is in shale - with a cement/bentonite grout.

A well drillers will tremie cement/bentonite grout thru a pipe starting at the bottom of the well and then works the pipe up until he has sealed the proper length of the well.

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This is the government the Founding Fathers warned us about.....

Yes shale will cause it and the smell may never go away, but if you can keep the bacteria out, then there is no reason you can't use it to water the plants and fill the water tanks up. No need to go spending tons of money if that is all the well will be used for.

approached my editor about doing a piece on my "well diaries" and they are all for it, they think it will be good for folks to learn from my mistakes/issues....

well, 24 hours and the test is still purple, happy dance, not so much because I think this test is real accurate as I am thinking there was still a bit of bleach in the well even tho I waited 72 hours and pumped several times, but more so if the bloody thing turns yellow with bleach in the water I will be most dismayed

it is funny, if I wait a full 24 hours between pumping, the smell and color is greatly reduced, I assume it deggasse itself (which is a bit odd as the well is pretty well sealed) and settles...

Used to have a sulfur well in S FLA. It was bad. We rigged up a concrete vat about 4' wide, 2' deep and 10' long. We put a roof on it and screened it to keep the bugs and trash out. We pumped the water from the well and it went through a PVC pipe above the water level in the vat. Had drilled many small holes in the PVC pipe and the water was aerated and that took out most of the sulfur. We then pumped the water from the vat into the house.

That is typical of hydrogen sulfide. I rented a place that had well water like yours. I kept a jug of water in the refrigerator. I found that the smell was gone when the gas dissipated after a day.

I've a big 550 gallon tank I got from a food place, cleaned the cooking oil out of it and use it for water at the farm, figure I pump it full and arrate it with a solar powered pump to help it along...

how high should it hang? I know I lose volumn with every foot, and it refills so very slowly...

How high up is the water level in relation to the depth of the well?

__________________
Alice
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"No great thing is created suddenly." ~Epictitus

at the time of digging, the static level was 20 feet, my hubby claims 30, I would say it averages 25...

36 hours and still Barney on the water sample, whew hew

If you only have 20 Ft of water I would raise it to 10 Ft off, and then you have to see if it pumps dry or not, Maybe you can pump the water into your holding tank a little slower, Itnstead of pumping faster and lowing the pump.

If you use grout to seal the shale, you can lower the pump all the way down to the bottom. There won't be anything to stirr up.

Joe, sorry, my well is 140 feet deep, the static level (the drop from the top of the well to the surface of the well water, I am probably using the wrong term, that is what the well guy called it) is about 25 feet so I have probably 115 feet of water total in the well, maybe 170 gallons, but it is a slow refill...the pump I have is like seven gallons a minute, I am not sure how to slow it down, I plug it in and off it goes

it is the smallest pump power pump I was told that would work with the depth of my well..

the driller said I should put in a hand pump, not sure how much free time he thought I had

I keep going back and forth with doing this, I know if I wait a day and a half the water will clear, and it was hard to tell from the video how much was coming in from the bottom to help it refill compared to how much was coming down the sides to refill; on the other hand It would be nice to eliminate the smell for the most part on pump out as it takes so long to refill...

You don't have a pressure tank and control switch? Are you saying it just runs till all the water is run out of the well?

__________________
Alice
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"No great thing is created suddenly." ~Epictitus

that is my plan, but with a big plastic storage tank..am guessing the concrete did a quicker job gassing it but I am thinking I might ad a small air system to the tank to help it along