FAQ

Frequently Answered Questions

• What are the chances of not hitting water?
  • Tumalo, Deschutes County, Alfalfa, and Bend, OR have an abundance of water. We are 99.9% sure we will hit water however we do not guarantee that we will hit water. The premier water drilling magazine the “National Driller” states that guaranteeing quantity and quality of water is the number #1 reason that well drillers go bankrupt.
• Is there good water / bad water?
  • All water is good. Some areas in Oregon have water tainted with arsenic or sulfur. This doesn’t occur in Central Oregon (CO). Occasionally in CO you will find iron bacteria, which isn’t harmful but makes look like ice tea water. There are some proven filtration systems for this. Contact us to learn more.
• What about the common Central Oregon problem of “black sand”?
  • CO has a perpetual black sand problem. It’s well known in the well drilling and construction industries the problem of black sand in CO wells. Doug has figured out how to “shut the sand off and still get clean water out.” Central Oregon universally recognizes Doug’s skill to keep the black sand away.
• Can you drill in the winter when the ground is frozen?
  • After you get below the frost line (20 inches +/-) you can drill whether it is 0 degrees or 110 degrees outside. Frozen dirt is really not a problem since there are much harder surfaces beneath the ground that we drill through.
• Why are the bid and final costs different?
  • When a proposal is written it provides an estimated price based on research of the surrounding wells. The estimate could change if the depth was deeper (final cost increases) or shallower (final cost decreases). It can also change if the estimated amount of cement was different from actual used.
• What’s the story on well witching?
  • It is common for a homeowner to tell us they’ve hired a well witcher who has never been wrong. Doug’s experience is that he’s never found someone who is right. If a well witcher is extremely confident about her/his witching skills, they should guarantee and offer to pay for the cost of drilling the well to the water.
  • Several years ago the City of Redmond hired a witcher who had “never been wrong” and it cost the city three full days and thousands of dollars.
  • As stated in the first FAQ, you will get water virtually anywhere you drill in Central Oregon. Depending on the topography of a specific region, if you drill 300 feet in any direction water will be found.
• Is Central Oregon ground water drying up?
  • No. When a well goes “dry” in Central Oregon it is because the first well was insufficient. It is a matter of inefficient depths. A well pump should be 20 feet above the bottom of the well, so that the pump is never covered by slowly settling ground. Shallow wells that rely on water that has leaked from canal start to fail because they were drilled too shallow (150 feet) but wells that are actually drilled a sufficient depth or where actual ground water exists will persist.
• Powell Butte Mountain
  • Powell Butte Mountain is the most unique place to drill in Central Oregon. Powell Butte Mountain is clay underneath and was here thousands of years before the Cascades erupted. As such when groundwater started flowing, it went around the hard clay of Powell Butte Mountain. This is why Powell Butte residents have such trouble locating water. As such most hit water at a more shallow depth but the rate of flow is slower and they build cisterns to store the water. With a slower flow, the water pump works 24 hours a day, slowing filling the 20,000 gallon cistern so the resident has enough water for daily needs. As such very few Powell Butte residents have manicured landscape.
• Facts about well drilling in Central Oregon
  • Hawaii and Central Oregon have the two newest land masses in the world. As such drilling in these two locations is unpredictable with the layers of ground underneath unpredictable from one house to the next.
  • USGS conducted a 5 year study requiring all Central Oregon well drillers to take a sample of composition each 10 feet they drilled. After 3 years of the 5 year study, USGS cut the study short when they realized that CO was exactly as the well drillers told them. The study was finalized in 1996 or 1997.
    • In the study summary, USGS included a special thanks to Aiken Well Drilling for cooperation and assistance.
    • USGS concluded Central Oregon is not using 1/100th of 1% of the ground water running underneath CO.
    • Water being consumed today from a faucet took 52 years to make it through the ground.