We bought this place as “undeveloped” land. No buildings. Rural/semi remote. But we came from a farm with a good well that did 14 gallons/minute, so were not too scared about drilling a well here. The neighbour, who we employed with his excavator to do some of the first work on the property (put in the driveway, etc) told us “There’s lotsa water around here, no problem”. He pointed up on the hillside, where an obvious patch of poplar was growing in the middle of a fir forest… a spring. As we further explored the property we now owned, we found other springs. In a “semi arid” area, we have LOTS of water. When the well was drilled, the water came bursting out the ground, spurting up several feet, and started to flood the surrounding area. Artesian well, 60 feet deep hit the motherload. Had to make an emergency call to another neighbour with a backhoe to rush over here to dig a ditch to channel the water away from our building site and down to the lower level/creek that runs through the middle of the farm. I looked at the DH and said, “I don’t know much about drilling wells, but I think that this is a VERY good thing”. It was. They figure it spews about 60 gallons per minute, non stop, for the last 15 years. I’m planning on having a fish pond dug at some point on that lower level to do something with all this water that is nice and useful. The water is clear and cold, and tastes great. It does have some mineral content, but we can deal with that. The water at our old farm was good too, but when I took horses in to the track to race, the water in Vancouver was so chlorinated that they would not drink it. I couldn’t face drinking it either… it’s so horrific. I had to pack well water from the farm so that they would drink. These days, I often pack water from the farm when I go to a show, again, just so that they won’t have to drink horrible water, or worse yet they refuse to drink the horrible treated water that is all you can get in cities these days. So I am big on well water.
“Water is the new gold”. When you are looking at property, look for water FIRST. If you have no water, or bad water, or limited water, it’s a shit piece of property… walk away, don’t buy it. Look for poplar groves, where there is poplar, there is water. We have water rights on that spring on the hillside.
We have a propane fueled generator which kicks in if we lose power, because our heating system is a wood fired outdoor boiler, which heats our house and our hot water (for free), but does have pumps to move the water. And since it does get COLD here in winter, it is crucial that we do have power, or else everything freezes, including us. So, IF the power goes out, we still have water, and heat, the generator automatically kicks in. The power doesn’t go out here very often (usually only if someone runs their vehicle into a power pole out on the highway), apparently the power plant down the road can route power through several different routes if there’s a problem somewhere, but we are still glad that we have the generator.
