Going for a borehole - Taking the plunge

[Suggers]

Finally, after a few years of umming & aaring, going for a borehole for water. Our last water bill was horrendous.
This is not for the house (too complicated) - just to feed 3 fields for 40 polo ponies who come to us for their winter rest. (it pays the mortgage)
One horse will drink about 5/6 galls a day - while grazing + dry hay.
We're in chalk/clay/chalk - average water table level 8m -
Evidently we should go down 15m.
Just been quoted £100 per m. plus £100 per m. for sleeving.
Any advice from anybody about do's & don't do's, appreciated.
GB Groundworks - you come from horse background - how's your water bill this year ?

[seanandruby]

thats a lot of water that you can source for free once it pays for itself. can see the advantage of these projects that eventually save money like thermal piling to source the heat from below ground. messy work tho.

[msh paving]

http://www.boreholedrillers.co.uk/

try this guy iv seen him do a 400ft well

[GB_Groundworks]

living up north and on a hill water is the one thing we have loads of.

our house is on a natural spring with a well so the stables take there water from there, but for the fields we have old cast iron baths sunk into ditch lines around the edge of the fields with a sediment filter up hill of them and then a pipe into the bath.

no problem last couple of years with water but we do have a bowser just in case that we park next to our machine shed and the 6" down spout goes into it and fills it with rain water.

but we don't have 40 ponies to look after,

so that wasn't much help with your bore hole, not sure about your water board but the old north west water used to do an unmetered water connection for a field for about £130 set fee a year?

[lutonlagerlout]

we are on a job in tring, suggers which i guess is not a million miles from you
it is pure chalk there and the well which we have just cast the beam over is 10 m to water level and about 12m in total,TBH given the amount of rain we have had i would have thought it would be a lot fuller
good luck
LLL

[Suggers]

Thanks for the replies - think the strata will be v. similar to Tring. Will post some pics when we finally get going. It's all new to me !

[danensis]

I presume you've checked about needing an abstraction licence?

[Suggers]

Yep - they changed the regs in April 2005 - extractions of less than 20m3 per day are exempt - and that's a huge amount.

[danensis]

Ooh, I might consider baling out my cellar!