# Plans for developing a spring?



## BeaG (Aug 21, 2008)

We are looking for internet links to plans for developing a spring. The spring is uphill from the house, and is to be used for drinking water and for watering a garden. The spring feeds into a natural pond.

This subject may be covered somewhere else in HomesteadingToday, but I did about four or five searches, and did not find any answers.

Can someone point me to links in other forums on HT, or to links on the internet with some detailed instructions for developing a spring?

Thanks, BeaG.


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## countryboy84 (Dec 8, 2010)

Every time that I have used spring water we cleaned the area out where the spring came out of the ground and built a concert block wall to kinds filter it some then another little block box to hold a small amount of water put a pipe in the last course of block to allow water to still keep flowing. The line to the house or animals went in the mini resavior then to the pump and pressure tank for those that went to the house and to jut a little pump for watering animales


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## Gymno (Jan 23, 2011)

Does the spring water come above ground? If so, you will need to capture it below grade and then divert it to a storage container which would feed you rsystem. You then will need to grade the surface so that surface water doesn't stand on it. I don't think there is any general design criteria that u will find, as each is different. 

If you have any specific questions you can ask, or provide some photos. I can probably help as i have done this professionally for a city that had its water supply from a spring and needed it protected and developed. 

Good luck,
Jim


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## BeaG (Aug 21, 2008)

Thanks to countryboy84 and to Gymno for offering your suggestions, and to Gymno for offering your help. We may indeed be in touch with you Gymno, for advice. Too bad you live all the way across the US from us. 

Right now, we are in the early planning stages. The spring we are hoping to develop is one that used to supply a farmhouse years ago. It did have some concrete around it, but that has deteriorated over time, and the pool at its base is full of leaves, dirt, etc.. It is uphill from the current home, but quite far away. Right now, the hill is covered by piles of snow. We were hoping to bring the spring back to life as a source of emergency drinking water, and as a better way to water the garden.

Our main problem is that we are both old, and we need to find someone in our area who can do the actual physical labor. We will probably have to provide that person with a detailed plan. The things that were in the heads and the experience of the past generations are all gone from the majority of the younger people.

Since making this request for help, we have found some very helpful information on the internet. I'll keep you posted.


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## anette (Jun 20, 2008)

are you going to build a springhouse for cooling also?


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## Nature_Lover (Feb 6, 2005)

BeaG, You said that you found a some help on the internet. Would you please share some links?

I have a few two season springs, but the only year round spring on my property flows into my creek near the bottom of a 5' bank, which floods to at least eight feet every year. The spring water is safe to drink, but as soon as it mixes with creek water, it is contaminated with high lead levels, and other stuff.

I'm having a hard time finding information regarding a cap design that would seal out creek water when completely covered by springtime floods, and be practical and safe.

I've just about given up on finding any help, and I'm going to cap it with cinder blocks that can be opened and cleaned out every year.

Here are a couple of links:

Protecting Water Supply Springs

The Rural Art of Capping A Spring

I don't want to hijack your thread, I'm just looking for links and ideas, too.
Thank You!


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## willow_girl (Dec 7, 2002)

I will be watching this thread with interest. There are so many springs on my land that you can't swing a cat without hitting one! One in particular is a real pain in the patootie as it drains down my driveway and washes out the gravel. 

One of the springs has been developed and was the water source for the original house (no longer standing). This spring is piped into a settling tank, and then gravity-drains into a larger (500 gal?) cistern. Both have heavy cement lids. I keep a sump pump in the cistern for an emergency water source if the well pump goes down or the lines freeze, etc. In a worst-case scenario, I could dip buckets, but it wouldn't be fun to tote them up that steep bank. It hasn't come to that yet, thank goodness!

There is another (undeveloped) spring in the hill that my cows like to drink from. They prefer it to their stock tank. Whenever we get a warm day, it starts flowing, and I'll see their hoofprints in the snow, going up the hill to get a drink! 

Springs are kinda neat, and I'm glad to have them, although I could probably do without the one. Maybe I'll get ambitious this year and figure out something to do with it (other than cuss at it).


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## Forerunner (Mar 23, 2007)

When I first moved in here as an eager young lad, at 22, I did notice where an old pond dam had been, and broken years before.....and that there was a particularly wet spot a few dozen yards up the ravine from where the dam had been.
Having always loved water in all of its forms and for all of it's benefits, I wasted no time with the old backhoe I bought that summer, and patched that dam.
It made a fine little swimming hole for a young man and his bride (the following year).
A couple years later, I bought my first dozer, and that pond grew by 8 or 10 times....

It was late 1998 when we really got serious about the possibility of setting up for complete independence if the need arose, and water was shortly at the top of the list.
We have a drilled well here, poked in sometime in 1906, by an old fellow then whom my father recollected also kept bees.  It has a 4 inch, steel casing, and was always a dickens to find a pump for, and it has a lot of iron in in....and the water is 70 feet down.... so, I recollected that seep up above the pond (still miraculously above water level in spite of my ambitions with the bulldozer).

I walked up there with a shovel....it was mid-summerish and dry elsewhere.... and proceeded to poke around in the leaves and, sure enough, it was still seepy and there was even enough flow to keep the upper portion of the pond noticeably much colder than the bulk of its late July bathwaterness.
I ended up taking the backhoe up and around and backed down as close as I dared and cleaned the area out about three feet below where the uppermost trickle could be seen coming out of the ground. I then laid in several tons of what would otherwise be septic grade river rock, clean stuff about the size of an egg or a little smaller, level, to about two feet below that upper seep. Then I attached a stainless steel sand point to a fifty foot or so stretch of inch ID black plastic water line, heavy stuff, and laid that out so that my outlet was about ten feet from and about 18 inches above the pond level.
I buried the entire area in another level foot of the same rock, then about a foot of loose straw, then heavy cardboard boxes, then covered that with the earth and leaves that had originally come out of the hole. I laid in an impromptu dam right below the gravel bed to form an underground pool.
It took a few days for the water to clear up from the mud and sand residue, but clear it did, and Wendy came to prefer that water so that, no matter where we traveled back in those days, she took enough with her to last for the duration of the trip. .
That spring seep has run, though sometimes at a trickle, through several severe droughts since that time. I do occasionally plumb up and shock the system with a blast of a hundred pounds or so of air pressure, which does greatly increase the flow immediately following, and that lasts for several years.

Since then, out of a whim to experiment, I've buried a twenty-four inch by twelve inch diameter section of clay tile, vertically, just out of the stream and into the hillside a little, several feet downstream from the spring outlet.
That clay tile accepts perfectly a stainless steel pot lid that keeps frogs and leaves out, and, after dipping the water out a couple times a day for several days and giving it a shot of 35% peroxide, it now maintains crystal clear and easily provides us with all the drinking and cooking water we need. The water level inside is several inches higher than the pond, though only feet away from the same, which slightly fascinates me.
The trick is to keep sunlight and surface runoff _out_, which is easy enough by just letting several inches of pipe protrude from ground level, keep it covered, and stay out of that stream bed.
I have since obtained several sections of concrete pipe, from three to ten feet in length and ranging in diameter from 12 to 36 inches, and have plans for sinking one or more of those in the same vicinity only to give myself a more substantial reservoir.

If you have a seep, or a clean pond with no chemical or overt livestock residue coming into it, you can sink a pipe a small ways from it and expect the ground and the pipe itself to sufficiently otherwise filter that water, and that water level to maintain sufficiently to readily water house and typical homestead livestock, and, with a little planning, set up higher than house and outbuildings to facilitate a gravity feed.

I have also trenched in to my pond from the other, downstream end, and laid inch black plastic to a typical hydrant that sits right next to my driveway, probably about eight feet below pond water level. I put a stainless steel sand point on that pipe as well, where it sticks into the pond (about three feet below the surface and guarded with cattle panels). That hydrant has never failed me, summer or winter. Later I dug down, plumbed up to the same pipe, and ran another black plastic line under the drive a hundred and fifty feet down to the cattle barn. My, that's been nice. 
I'm not sure how great a drop there is in elevation down there. It couldn't be more than eight or ten feet lower than the upper hydrant, but the pressure difference and volume of flow are quite marked.
When someone is using the lower hydrant, there is still a usable volume that flows from the upper, though greatly reduced from typical. Rare it is that both are required simultaneously, though.

So, my experience is that a little imagination and a small expenditure of resources can generally supply ample water from what otherwise appears only to be a muddy spot in a hillside.


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## BeaG (Aug 21, 2008)

Nature_Lover said:


> BeaG, You said that you found a some help on the internet. Would you please share some links?


Thank you Nature_Lover for the links. I will be glad to try to send you what we found. I'll put the links below. However, unfortunately, one link goes to a .pdf file, and the other goes to a PowerPoint presentation. So.. you need to have the Adobe reader for the one, and Power Point for the other. Here they are:

http://pubs.cas.psu.edu/FreePubs/pdfs/XH0024.pdf

http://www.epa.gov/owow/watershed/wacademy/acad2000/transient/spring_8a.ppt

I have both of these files saved to my computer as .pdf files, but I would need to send them to you via a regular email address. I could not find a way to attach a file to our blog messages.


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## BeaG (Aug 21, 2008)

Forerunner, I loved reading your experiences with water. We will hang on to your notes for possible reference.


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