Will my well whileaway my water woes - High water table

[davidward]

My heartfelt thanks to whoever instigated this excellent website. My problem is: Our house and land sits on thick clay. North and East surrounding land is approx 60cm below floor level. West is 60 cm above floor level. South garden is at floor level extending out 8 metres with water table 15cm below surface and well is 20 metres from house also south but located on raised section of garden level with surrounding fields. Winter level of well is 10cm above house floor level!!!!!! If I automatically pump well at 60 cm below house floor level will it reduce water table level below house significantly or should I install land drainage, if so how many, how close to house, how far apart, With grateful thanks.

[TheRobster]

Both solutions have one obvious problem - if you remove the water from the ground, where are you going to put it? If you are in the UK then it is highly unlikely that you will be allowed to dispose of it to a sewer system.

[davidward]

What I should have explained is; We live in Rural France and 10 metres from the well is an open ditch channelling road surface water to a lake half a mile away. We have spoken to the locals and it would appear that garden surface water is discharged into this ditch and our neighbours can see no reason why we shouldn't pump our well water into the ditch if it will cure our problem. The question is, will it?

[TheRobster]

Ah, I see. In that case a field drainage system is probably your best bet. There's information on this website somewhere about designing these.

I don't think a pump would be the best option for a number of reasons:
1) You are only extracting water at one point so whilst it will make some difference to the immediate water table level, I'd be a bit concerned about how much effect is would have over a larger area. It may be that the water flows so slowly through the soil medium that it doesn't really have much of an effect beyond a few metres. You mention that the soil is clay....this nearly always has a low hydraulic conductivity.
2) Energy costs - you'd probably have to run the pump pretty much continuously.
3) What happens if/when the pump burns out? If this happened and you didn't know then you'd be back to square one.

A field drainage system, once installed, doesn't require any power and little maintenace (if any) and it will extract water from multipe points rather than a single well....so I'd go with that option if possible.

[davidward]

What you advise makes very good sense. I shall do what you say! Thank you for your expertise and again thank you for an extremely good website.