Commerce and industry is often involved in surveying existing boreholes on developing or other owned premises, but perhaps thousands more borehole surveys are conducted each year for individuals too. You’ve bought a plot or even a suburban house. You can see the borehole casing sticking out of the ground a little, and you know there’s a borehole there. But how do you equip it with a cable, pipe, motor and pump if you don’t know its capabilities, its depth, or its delivery?
To gain the utility of a borehole you’ve inherited or perhaps never used, you have to know the condition it’s in underground, whether the shaft has collapsed or not, at what depth the water sits, what the return rate is, and how much it can legitimately deliver. None of these metrics might seem onerous to establish, but as many people find out, there is no substitute for genuine analysis when it comes to boreholes. Professional borehole surveys step in when you need to know, and they’re a crucial component of harnessing the potential from any borehole.
Do the Homework and You’re Good to Go
Borehole surveys take the guesswork out of utilising underground water and help avoid costly mistakes when you’re looking to equip and use a borehole. Over-estimate the capacity? You’ll likely over-equip the borehole and suffer a burnt-out motor in the immediate future. The “capacity” of a borehole is, put simply, how much water the borehole can deliver on a regular basis when pumping. Especially with unknown boreholes, you might even see water standing in the hole, not too far down the shaft. When you drop a string down to see how far down the shaft goes, you might find there are 20 or 30 metres of standing water in the hole!
Fantastic! Lots of water. But when you simply guess the size of the motor and pump in your exuberance to equip the hole, you might find that the equipment you’ve dropped down the hole sucks it dry within a minute or two, leaving your motor spinning dry, soon to burn out. That’s because the return rate, or how quickly the water refills that shaft from surrounding fissures and veins, is slow. A borehole survey would have picked that up, that while the borehole is “full of water”, you can’t trade on that visual appraisal. You need to conduct a borehole survey in order to determine what you can legitimately expect from the hole as a sustainable supply.
Borehole Surveys Give You the Intel You Need
Not only will a borehole survey allow you to accurately determine the hole’s capacity, but it also determines the size of the motor and pump you’ll use to pump water. Too big? The borehole won’t be able to pump consistently and soon the motor will burn out. Electrical intelligence on the DB might save your motor by switching it off, assuming you’ve employed sensors to monitor the water level, but borehole surveys are done precisely to avoid this kind of silly frustration. More than irksome, it’s also a waste of time and money dropping gear down a hole, when you don’t know whether it matches the capacity of a borehole.
Equip the borehole with a motor or pump that’s too small? You might be sitting on, say, 10 000 litres an hour, but only get 3 000 litres simply because you’ve equipped the hole incorrectly. Perhaps that’s insufficient for your needs, and you might mistakenly be drilling an additional borehole or two, looking for water, not knowing that your existing borehole has far greater capacity than you’ve allowed for. Determining the condition of the shaft, the available water as a pumped resource, and the best route to correctly equipping a borehole is what borehole surveys are all about.
Inyati Group Brings Science to the Field
If you don’t find us borehole drilling in Pretoria and surrounds, you’ll likely find us out in the field, conducting borehole surveys, taking the mystery out of things, and getting clients up and running. Inyati Group is all about correct methodologies, a professional approach, and happy customers. We bring the best practices to drilling, evaluating, and equipping boreholes, and save our customers a whack in the process.
No one walks into an auto parts shop and guesses at the make and model of their car. Similarly, no one gets any joy simply dumping an indiscriminate motor and pump size down a borehole that may or may not still be clear and productive. The science behind boreholes isn’t necessarily extremely hi-tech, but you have to get some things dead right, or the value and joy of having underground water on tap isn’t going to happen. Call us or mail us, but get us on board for all things borehole, and we’ll get you up and running as quickly and cost-effectively as possible!