Deep well drilling in the desert near Joshua Tree (part 1) 

How much did end up costing?

How did you pick the spot to drill ?

@@jimsjacob he replied and said his options were limited . I was wondering in they used ground based radar or some modern technology to find the best spot to drill ? I guess not .

@@ryanlangford2333 Probably $25K - $30K.

@@ryanlangford2333 a big splash

my grand pa did 500 acres in Wyoming in 1921 his friend left gave him 500 more acres but the acres is desolate still open land there now, they found oil hundred miles away

Wow, memories indeed! No sulfur smell here but lots of other stuff that shows up in my water rest video coming soon. Really enjoyed your story though. Thanks for sharing it.

Bret Thanks for the share! Great history

Wow, thanks! Much appreciate hearing that.

Thanks! And I agree... Was a real treat to watch those guys do what they do.

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks! Really appreciate the comment. And thx for watching.

Jim 20,000ft is more than 6,000m. 6km. What reason for so deep? 2. Can air blow out the chips from that depth? Or did you have foam assistance? Thanks. RSA.

@@antonhuman8446 air is only good to about 12000 ft. 20000 ft vertically is not uncommon with fluid mud. A lot of wells go horizontal at some depth and can go 30000 ft overall length.

Thanks! @@jimjackson1087

Interesting! Definitely different here with water, at least in this geology. Thx for sharing....

Different

Spent many hours welding surface casing. It was muddy and nasty in those cellars, but it paid good

Glad you like them!

Agreed, and thanks for watching!

Ohh glad I could help and definitely would recommend. Good luck to you!

Glad you enjoyed it!

Oh wow, very different technique for what I assume are very different ground conditions. Thanks for sharing that!

Thx for watching!

Thanks! Gotta get my butt in gear and put it together 🤦

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for watching!

I find it very exciting! ;)

Really glad you enjoyed it!

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks so so much for the compliments! And thanks for watching! As for the missing part, there's a part 2 😉

Thank you for adding clarity and color! Much appreciated 🙌

Referred to them as "downhole hammer with flat bottom bit" when working in the Arkoma Basin of Arkansas and Oklahoma and the process as "air-drilling" and when no water you are "dusting" and when you encounter some water, you may need to "mist" or "foam" the air to create a wall cake. I was a wellsite geologist in the 70s & 80s.

I thought so!

Interesting! Here, they pour concrete between the 20' steel sleeve and the surrounding rock to make sure no contamination can seep in (plus the concrete pad that's required surrounding the steel sleeve at ground level).

That makes sense. Yall get more rain than Texas. If we got that much rain I would set up a rain water harvest system and skip the cost of the well.

Awesome, thx for commenting!

Loved working on drill rigs and great satisfaction supplying people with water. Company is now in hands of third owner..I was second. First owner started in 1922 and I bought in in 1972 with a 71 Star cable tool. Ran Portadrill 10 TG and TKT before moving up to Gefco 30 K..new owners just purchased a new one to be smog compliant in Nothern CA. We're 102 years young..LOL

Glad you enjoyed it!

Yeah, clearly out of my depth here but I still hope and think it's interesting and useful to people not familiar with any of it!

@@LetsOverthinkThis Sorry if I sounded a smart ass there, many years in the drilling game and some descriptions make me cringe a bit, glad you got your water though. HNY for 2023.

Well we're all here to learn (I assume) so if you feel like it, mind correcting some of the descriptors for us all? Much appreciated!

@@LetsOverthinkThis a lot of the tools are custom made and there names are made up most of the time IV been to pump convention but most of the stuff made by a machine shop 🛠️💯👍✌️🍻💦

Thanks!

Real pros. 👍

Oh man sorry to hear that! Thanks for the vernacular though!

Thanks for the comment. Which mountains are you referring to? And are you sure that's 100gpm?! That's an INSANELY high flow if true. 🤯

Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks for watching and saying hi!

@@LetsOverthinkThis hello

I thought so too, and thx for watching!

Thanks and I was too!

Oh wow that's weird since at least where I am (also in San Bernardino)you actually HAVE to have water before you can even get a permit to build anything. Which makes sense but I wonder what they expect you to do for water? Anyway sorry to hear that. Thanks for watching and good luck to you!

isn't that the same county where Nestle pumped millions of gallons of spring water over the state allotment?

Posted! Sorry for the delay.

Thank you for watching!

Interesting! To be honest I wasn't trying to prevent reabsorption since it's all just water and ground up rock with a little bit of biodegradable foaming agent adding in but yours is definitely a cleaner approach! 👍

Hi Tony! You're right, though things are a little different with these new-fangled pumps. The pump itself has a water sensor in it so it doesn't run dry and I've tested it.... it just shows low water on the panel top-side and resumes when submerged again. Also, not being a traditional pump, you're not supposed to gate the output of it. I don't know how much that matters since it's already pushing against a potential 500 feet of head but none-the-less being a brushless digital drive, it can get confused by being gated. The pump will empty into a big holding tank and I will definitely have a float switch at the top to keep it from overflowing. And I will likely have another float under that one which triggers the pump to turn back on so the pump isn't cycling a lot as that top switch gets triggered on and off. IE the "band" will be wider and the water will have to fall maybe a foot in that big tank for the well pump to switch on (and then it will get to stay on for a while instead of going on and off). I also have something else up my sleeve: the pump has a very repeatable wattage curve that is dependent on the water depth which means I may build a little box that shuts off the well pump as the water gets low in the hole but BEFORE the pump actually senses it's dry, just to safeguard things. Thanks for watching and for your contribution here!

Curious, how do you know that works? I'm not saying it doesn't but have you ever done like an A/B test?

@@LetsOverthinkThis it doesn't work on anything less than very shallow surface water, I do electro-seismic groundwater surveying for a living its technology they use in the oil and gas industry to measure the depth of resistive liquids, I can tell you if there is a presence of water or not also at what depth it begins and ends also the yield youll have in gpm, accurate to a few feet.

A Sah la malikom my brother... How are things there, These days?

@@lifeisa.smalllesson4607 keep up the good work!

I like eggs

@@Trey4x4 indeed

Oil or water?

Yes the whole property will be solar... We're off grid here. That said, the handful of 100w panels on my container nearby already handle the well pump easily.

Yeah, definitely not the deepest well out there. Jealous of that 1M ltr/day flow, but this is a desert and we were lucky to get water *at all*. :)

@@LetsOverthinkThis we have a great artesian basin here in Australia.. some bores only need to go down a couple of hundred mtrs others about 1 km . The pressure is natural not requiring water to be pumped to the surface , but to minimise evaporation , they must be capped, sealed , piped, water stored in tanks etc . On very isolated outback properties , Open drains were used yrs ago getting water to dams & isolated homes but evaporation rates were huge

Oh wow, yeah, I think the drilling was consistent. Must really add to the drilling time to keep having to pull all the rod out to change bits. Yikes.

yeah I've heard that, and to be fair, I think some parts of the high desert I'm in also require that sort of depth. These things seem to be VERY location-specific. Thanks for commenting!

Agreed but I think you may be thinking agriculture-scale water pumping. This is a well for a single family home and the pump easily pumps with about 600 watts to provide around 6gpm from the hole. The static water level is around 190 which honestly isn't bad at all considering...

Thanks for watching and yeah, sorry I missed those aspects! I did answer many times in the comments since, but to summarize: Cost was around $60k for what you see here and as for the spot, I bought the land knowing it was likely (but not certain) that water could be found there based on neighbor's wells, etc. I don't believe in dowsing rods (though anyone is free to!) especially at this depth, so we picked the spot that made the most sense for my site plan: most spots on the property would have been more of a pain in the future in terms of trenching and such. The drilling company just bought the rig here after practically running their old rig into the ground over the previous few decades so I, too, was impressed by how clean and new it was :) Anyways, thanks for the comment!

​@Let's Overthink This the rods definitely work but not for locating a well, they do work for finding shallow water, water lines and wires

​@@markwilliams4525 no

@@ronandingridjohnson1409 no what?

@@ronandingridjohnson1409 Yes

Thanks for watching! Still putting together the part 2 video but yeah, the perforated casing only was for the bottom ~100 feet (though I think the actual lowest 20 foot section or two are not perforated). and the rest of it was solid. The PVC well casing is 4" diameter but the hole is I think 6" so even without perforations, the water from higher strata will still be flowing down to the bottom to go through those perfs. That may not work in clay or other type materials, but since this is granite, even with cave-ins and such over time, I'm pretty sure water will still make its way down along the PVC to where there are perfs.

Hi, we'd like to supply you with tricone bits and PDC bits for water well drilling. www.srtdrillbit.com

@@LetsOverthinkThis - - Water recovery time is important. A pump located 10 feet below a water line may not get enough water to pump properly. Just commenting.

@@richardbowers3647 For sure and good point! My pump is sitting about 350 feet below the static water level so there's actually good water storage in the hole and it's nicely submerged. The well itself doesn't have a high production, so it's definitely possible to get that level down to the pump, but that's why the well pump will be feeding a 5000 gallon storage tank on the surface so I can control how much cycling that well pump does.

Lol, well you won't see either of those here.

Yeah. It's more precious than lots of people have been treating it...

Right? Gotta have water and it ain't getting easier to find. Thx for watching!

@@LetsOverthinkThis also a good reason to stay in school so you don't have to do this line of work. It not easy or fun it's hard on the body.

Indeed. Life has gotten in the way. Video half edited and still hoping to get it out!

Finally posted part 2!

I didn't and I don't believe in it but I know people do and that's all good. 👍 I did use a well driller thats been doing this in this area for several generations. I think it was somewhere around 68/foot at the time.

@@LetsOverthinkThis The 3 city wells up in Yucca valley are @ 300 feet, as I recall. That is a great price for all the work needed!).

Thanks and good luck to you!

That's true in some ways but not so much for the naturally radioactive water you get super deep 😉

Thanks! I'm not a driller, so hopefully others can chime in. What I have seen is a lot of it being a family business with the nuances and variations taught over hundreds of wells drilled over the years. But that doesn't help anyone looking to get into it.....

Yes although not nearly enough rain here to be useful. But true in lots of other places!

It also not legal in California unfortunately 💦🛠️👍💯

Glad you found water 👍

👍

Yep, they've made drilling machines for a long time.

vegetation is a good indicator for water... I look for saguaro here in the Sonoran desert... you are in the lowest region on Earth... below sea level... in some areas .. if I was looking... those ankle high bushes are a pretty good indication that you should look somewhere else 😉.. in the Joshua tree areas... that's what I would look for

Except the Joshua trees aren't in any clusters.. they're pretty evenly distributed on my land. Plus you can't drill near them even if they did indicate water ... Also sorry to say while I agree that the topography might indicate deep water flows, the vegetation around here won't. The water is hundreds of feet deep and the plants all have super super BROAD root networks, not deep ones, because they have to get as much water from the surface as they can. What did you mean when you said "you are in the lowest region on earth, below sea level"?

Thanks for the comment. You mentioned oil but to be clear, this was water drilling, not oil. Also there is not an underground ocean: we're just hitting little streams of water between layers of rock. Now that said, I have heard that sometimes while drilling, they do hit a big open pocket and that YES, they had even lowered a camera but in this case it was just a big open rock cavern. The only life you're going to find down here (if any) is microscopic....

Where it made sense for my project and build, etc. Very few options, actually that make sense in terms of not having to pump water up hill a lot or trench needlessly.

Nice! Yeah even in North America it varies a LOT from just 5 or so meters all the way to 300 meters or more! I'd love to get water 15 meters down! 😊

Thats smart, particularly if one gigantic truck can't always get to where the well needs to be. Thanks for sharing 👍

Lots of reason... Once the site plan was done for the buildings and infrastructure, etc, there was really only one or two places to have the well that wouldn't cause a real pain later with long trenched water runs or having to pump water uphill a lot, etc. But no rhyme or reason in terms of where the water is underground. That far down, through rock, everyone with any experience here said it was basically luck of the draw.

You can have a survey and geologist point out a spot but there also guessing LoL 💦🛠️👍✌️💯

😉 🙌

You actually don't know and you pay either way! 😬 That said, there are nearby wells so it was likely. Some people believe in those rods and such to sense it but I don't and even if I felt like you could sense water at like 50 feet, I don't believe you can hundreds and hundreds of feet through granite. It's very very expensive to do this and even more-so now with the price of pvc, fuel, and everything being so high. Let's just say it was over $40k.... But it's a little pointless to even give that number since it varies a lot depending on your location, the depth, etc.

Thank you.. very cool video and informative and if nothing else at least we know who can do it in Southern California with good reputation. Awesome

@@coin2456 Glad you enjoyed it! Was super fun to watch the process, and yeah, any time I encounter people who care about the work they do, I'm happy to share that with others. It's increasingly rare it seems....

@@jessesilver once again thank you.. it's something I'm looking To do soon.. so your video is gold to me.. keep up the good work.. 👍

@@LetsOverthinkThis i cant find part II, 3 whatever but i have to ask you. You did find water at the end ? or not

See part 2! Worth it for me for sure. Not great production compared to most wells but for the desert and my purposes, just fine! 👍

This well is only for a small residence and no agriculture. There is plenty to complain about in terms of wasteful water use in the world but we'll consume the same amount wherever we are and pretty sure this isn't making a difference.

Deep! Whatever it takes, right?

@@LetsOverthinkThis Rocky

I didn't try witching because I don't believe in it (though many people do!). And I could be more easily convinced that it works for water like 20 or 50 feet underground. I'm not convinced anyone can sense water hundreds of feet down through solid granite. I don't know how many water tables their are since around here you're just hitting water between layers of rock and I knew it was most likely I'd hit it around the same depth my neighbors' wells had. Thanks for watching!

@@LetsOverthinkThis Good points. I am a land investor and witching works 100% on all my properties' am not sure about the depths. thanks

@@angelofamillionyears4599 Curious is it common to drill and not hit water where you are? My point is, if you're in a place where people often hit water, how do you know witching works? (not trying to be an ass, but genuinely curious)