Just wondered...seems like if one lived in hilly country, it would make sense to try to drill into the side of a hill and develop a spring, rather than drill a well and have to use a pump...
Is this ever done?
Sometimes simple is better...I would be inclined to want a good spring over a well if I had a choice.
That is an interesting point....it would be nice to have water gravity fed to your home.A friend of mine has a hillside spring that has enough head pressure to fill a bath tub in a 2nd story of his house.
I spent quite a few years in the water supply business and I have been a long-time advocate of horizontal drilling. If you look at the lay of the land, you can sometimes guess where there might be an underground clay layer. A clay layer holds the water from percolating downward so the water follows along on TOP of the clay. If you can drill in to a side hill and intersect the upper side of that clay layer, you'll get water. A Natural Spring is usually where the clay layer ends at a cut bank or a hillside and is therefore exposed. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
Macher:
The highways departments do that all the time in cuts. It releives pore pressure and hopefully the hillside does not come down to rest on the highway during really wet weather.
Using springs is common practice in the NC mountains. We have gravity fed system and find no fault with it. Every foot of fall generates approximately .46 lbs of pressure (assuming minimal pipe friction), so for, say, 80 lbs of tap pressure, you need 200 ft of elevation. With ours, we actually had to install a tank between the spring and the house site to reduce pressure. [img]/forums/images/icons/shocked.gif[/img]
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