Well Water

Well, well, well...  I have a bored well that is about 45 feet deep, with (I think) about 15 feet of water at the bottom.  That nets out to around 270 gallons.  The soil is in many places clay-like, and I have noticed some sediment in the water before.

I'm just returning the well to service, and this is what happened when I turned the water on:

This is a problem (especially so given that it's after filtration with a nominal 5-micron filter).  Outside, filling a stock tank looked like this:

My initial assumption was that the submersible pump was too close to the bottom.  So I had a well man out to look at it, and drew him a bucket of water to demonstrate.  It wasn't cloudy.  There was some sediment, but it was mostly clear.

Before this, I'd gotten a couple of water tests done.  It passed on minerals, failed on bacteria.  No E. coli, but plenty of other coliform bacteria.  The test results noted that could be caused by a number of factors, including surface water contamination.

That's exactly what the problem is.  The well guy diagnosed it fairly easily, but the symptoms were telling: cloudy after rain, fine when it's not raining.  The good news is there's a fix.  The bad news is that it'll be fairly messy to do.  Alas.  It involves digging around the concrete liner to about five feet, sealing, and backfilling with bentonite.  Part of this all will involve demolishing the well house and moving all of the plumbing underground--which will eliminate the danger of freezing pipes.

Hopefully after it all I'll be back to normal well sediment issues, which are not insignificant but nothing like what you see above.  I might need a better filter than one that's nominally rated at 5 microns (nominal = average, more or less, meaning some pores are larger than 5 microns).  This publication from the University of Nebraska indicates that clay particles can be 0.2-2.0 microns.

My filter is a pretty basic 10x2.5 single cartridge model (shown here gloriously silted up).  Culligan's best filter is a nominal 1 micron, but there are other 10x2.5 filters out there that claim to be absolute 1 micron (absolute means the filter should stop over 99% of particles over 1 micron versus maybe 85% for nominal filters).  Finer filters are more prone to clogging, perhaps...but I have an abosolute 1 micron filter cartridge to try.  If necessary, there are further steps that can be taken. There are multistage filters that can go all the way down to an absolute 0.2 microns if necessary (albeit possibly with a hit to water pressure that's already not very high...).  I'll see how things look after the well is refurbished.