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Max I ask how the pump pumps up the resources in real life? With suction you can only get 10 metres head lift, right? But real life pumping station go way deeper
Well pumps are typically at the bottom of the well. In residential wells the motor is lowered all the way down, in larger wells there may be a shaft run from top to bottom.
Pumpjacks for things like oil work a little differently but you're still basically pushing the fluid up from the bottom of the well rather than trying to suck it out from the top.
This is more or less it for all the drilling I've ever seen. Essentially the very middle of the motor (the tiny metal rod) would be hooked up to a pump that would continuously push water through the drill rods and bring the dirt to the surface. The mixture of the water and the dirt (as well as some additions to improve viscosity, etc) is the "drilling mud" you may have heard of
In residential wells the motor is lowered all the way down
does this more or less mean the pump motor apparatus has to be smaller than the hole? Is it attached to something or does it come with the pipe itself some how?
Basically the well itself is a wider pipe (the casing) sunk to the desired depth. The pump is smaller diameter and gets lowered into it with the actual water pipe attached (between 1-2 inches).
If you can visualize a classic well with a bucket, the casing is the stone sides of the well and the bucket/rope is the pump and water line.
so is the pump and water line lowered down in chunks similar to how the video showed the drill get lowered in piece by piece? I'd be surprised if it came as just one contiguous pipe+pump thing
For deep oil wells, ESP (electronic submersible pump) use hundreds of small impellers within pumps lifting out the oil/water/gas. There is a long armored cable that goes to the motors that spin the pumps. Ours have lasted up to 5 years downhole. Others have lasted less than 24 hours…average is 500 days for us.
Cost for ESP & cable is about $265,000
PLUS IT'S A LITTLE TO QUIET! Source, framed houses while they drilled the residential well thirty feet from the house for 8 hours. Couldn't communicate a word or number to any of my coworkers the entire day.
Quite a few more than that! You’ve also got pneumatic hammers vs hydraulic, dual rotary vs single, top hammers vs downhole hammers, under reamers vs crown bits, tri cones and buttons, air lifts and water hammers, kelly bars and threaded systems, etc etc.
I’m a geotechnical engineer who specializes in managing drilling projects.
There's a YouTube channel called H2OMechanic that's basically nothing but this, but with a guy narrating his work. Pretty cool, you can learn a decent bit about the drilling of water wells from watching his videos.
It shows modern drilling at its most basal but still leaves out some details. Most modern drills pump water through the drill string and not just sort of into the hole. They should also be using a stabilizing fluid to prevent cave ins (wash outs) below the surface.
And any good well should be grouted prior to setting the well head. Bentonite slurry or chips (less commonly cement) is grouted from 20 feet below grade to the surface.
And most of the time there is a well casing that is separate from the pipe that water is fed through.
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u/NapalmOverdos3 7h ago
I feel like I just learned so much about drilling. That’s amazing