In my last column, I wrote about some customers who thought they knew more about well repair than we, as professionals, did. The solution to a long and unsuccessful fishing job was to drill a new well. Thinking back on this job, I wonder if we had not knocked the submersible pump we were fishing for to the bottom of the well and then reamed out the casing, if we couldn’t have gotten the pump out. We would probably have had to flush the reamings out hydraulically. Even if we had done this and had gotten the old pump out, the customer (a public facility) would have ended up with a fixed up old well and that usually is not a good value.
About the same time as that difficult fishing job, we were contacted by the head of a family on the outskirts of the major city where I live, Ann Arbor, Mich. This gentleman was a medical doctor and his wife taught music, I believe, from their home. They had four children, a son and three daughters, all of whom were teenagers or close to it. With six people in the family including the teenagers, they needed a good water supply, which they did not have. Upon checking out the jobsite, we found they were getting water from an old 4-inch well equipped with a jet pump that was installed in a basement offset, a popular method of completion before pitless adaptors became viable.