Uh oh! Well water suddenly turned brown!

[Wonders12]

Trying not to panic.

It wasn’t for no reason, a staff member ran into the well cap mowing with the tractor.

I have not seen it yet, and will be heading over soon, but I would really really appreciate some thoughts and suggestions on what to do.

He says he thinks it knocked rust down into it, which is what’s causing the color. But he also said with 4 inches of water in a bucket, he can barely see the bottom, so that sounds like more than a bit of surface rust to me. He said it doesn’t taste funky, but the water pressure seems lower than normal.

Troubleshooting online only brings up terrible scenarios.

I’m heading over there now to see what’s up. My plan was to run the water for a bit and see if it clears/becomes clearer. If not, I’ll fill a couple spare troughs to let the water settle (hopefully) overnight, and we can fill buckets off of that. We have a couple troughs to water the picky horses off of, but in the summer, we won’t get far with that.

Please tell me this is easily fixed? :no:

[Equibrit]

There’s probably muddy runoff entering the well.

[HorsesinHaiti]

Old well? Recent rains/ mud in the area? A break around the cap or the first 10’ or so of pipe is very possible. Running water and letting it settle is a good idea to get one diagnostic, to see what exactly is the contaminant - mud or rust.

If need be, for animals you could make and run a sand filter for awhile. It isn’t expensive if you have a barrel or suitable container and if you don’t need to eliminate all bacteria for your horses, it doesn’t have to be in a tall container. 1 1/2 foot height or a bit more might work just as a mechanical filter, it depends how fine the sediment is. The well is in a pasture with manure in the area?

This is a fairly clear video of how to make what you need. you could trickle feed the filter barrel off of your water source, just don’t let the incoming water fall directly onto the sand. We take a plastic basin the same diameter as the barrel or slightly bigger, so it sits about 3" clear of the sand. drill holes in bottom so water ‘rains’ onto sand instead of pouring like a flood.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KQNzhK9-mA

A true biosand filter should run at no more than 1 liter output per minute. a ‘just take out the sediment filter’ can run faster so long as you are happy with the water quality. giardia and worm eggs should be filtered out with a half height filter.

[HorsesinHaiti]

All that said, if the well is old or if you have any thought that the casing broke (might be several feet down), then you will have to get that well serviced by a pro sooner rather than later. Mud can abrade out/ burn out a submersible pump. Esp. if the upper casing is PVC, the fix shouldn’t be horribly expensive if they have tools to reach the break with glue and / or if the sealing or gravelling was done right.

Rusted out iron casing is what can kill a well and require redrilling.

[Wonders12]

Thank you so much!

When I got there, the water appeared to be full of iron, fortunately not dirt. While the cap was damaged, nothing else appears to be, and fortunately it’s high enough above the ground (and on a gentle grade) that it doesn’t appear that runoff is entering the well.

We ran the water out of the nearest hydrant for a while (I’m embarrassed to say how long considering the drought in other areas :uhoh:) and eventually it began to ran clearer. Around that time, the water pressure came back in other areas of the property. My assumption, and hope, is that the (ridiculously small for a barn) pipes got partially blocked, which decreased the pressure.

I didn’t want to say anything last night until it was still looking good this morning.

Thank you so much for the sand filter information! I’m definitely going to save that information for future emergency situations. Hopefully we will never need it, but it would have been a great temporary solution until we can get things fixed. Why does everything break on a Saturday at 5:30pm?

Thank you again!

[Alagirl]

be glad it wasn’t freezing!