Into the Woods

It looks like a rocket, but it’s a well bucket.

If a big storm or other crisis kept the power off for a long time, how would you get water? Everyone should have some containers of water tucked away for relatively short outages, but storage is not a good solution if for some reason the tap stopped working for days as opposed to hours. Those of us with wells are lucky. We have our own water. But we have to get it out of the well.

Some people with water wells solve the problem with electric generators. That will work. They’re expensive, though, and in a seriously long crisis in which the electric grid went down and stayed down, one might also run out of fuel to power a generator.

A cheaper form of insurance is a well bucket. Until a few decades ago, wells were fairly wide, and well buckets were six or eight inches, or more, in diameter. These days, though, modern wells are much smaller in diameter. Lehman’s sells a well bucket that is only 3.5 inches in diameter. It’s 52 inches long and holds 2 gallons of water. They are usually on back-order. They’re made by an Amish gentleman who has a hard time keeping up with the demand.

They’re made from galvanized stove pipe. The design is simple. The only tricky part of making a well bucket is the valve at the bottom. The valve must open and allow water to enter the bucket when the bucket hits the water, but the valve must close when the bucket is lifted. The valve in this bucket appears to be a piece of rubber which is fastened to a shaft that runs the full length of the bucket. The long shaft is a nice touch, because it should keep the valve moving smoothly. Some people also make narrow well buckets out of PVC pipe. Again, the foot valve is the challenge.

I’m stashing a bucket as cheap insurance, along with some rope, a pulley, and other hardware needed to mount a windlass over my well.

The top of the bucket

The bottom of the bucket