anyone know the going rate roughly per foot to drill and case a well in the george west area?

We are an hour or 2 south of you.

About 2 years ago we had (I'm going from memory here) a 6" casing well drilled and it was about 40-50 a foot. The per foot price includes a 3.5 hp pump, pressure tank all the 8x8 concrete slab around well all installed and tested, and running power to it, about 15-20 yards buried in conduit.

Usually 10 a foot to drill, 15-20 to case it, then 20-30 to finish it out, usually not including a slab or trenching. So turnkey what Redchevy said is on the money. Just thought I would share the latest breakdown we had.

Before you get too far into it run some calculations on the size of your pond, evaporation rate, watershed, soil type etc. Just because they can drill you a well doesn't mean it would be able to pump enough water to make any difference depending on your circumstances. Keep in mind an acre/foot is 325K gallons.

I would also think about my neighbors before I started pumping out all of the groundwater to fill a pond.

Majority of the surrounding properties have ponds already on their properties. No sure if they are well fed or not but a natural fill pond seems not possible there as the long hot periods without rain would dry it up super quick.

This is a deal we are working out with the landowner that if we fund just the drilling and casing they will cover everything else like the windmill, pond, calisthenics, culvert and all. We are looking at a half to 3/4 acre pond.

If It's not you're property, why do you want a pond?

I can't imagine a well to fill a whole pond. I believe most folks use troughs if filling from a well. Way too much water loss from evaporation and seeping into the ground when dealing with the surface area of a pond.

This - I dug a well to keep a 5 acre pond from going dry - must have a big enough pump and gallons per minute to even keep a pond during the summer at the same level. The amount of water it takes is way more than one typically thinks and evaporation is huge. Also the electric bill to run the pump can add up quick -

I've got friends in Oklahoma with 2 nice size ponds and their windmill well keeps them full, handles the evaporation just fine. Likely unable to fill a well without big irrigation wells and pumps though. I'll be placing windmill well on my pond for evaporation. Would go solar but we like aesthetics of the windmill and it's a pond at a wedding venue and folks like the windmill look versus solar panels.......In some counties there used to be government help on solar wells but no idea if it still exist

Scalebuster: This is a long term lease we have with the landowner and we want to improve our bird hunting on the property as well as overall animal ability to excel during the dry times. It is a company funded lease so the expense to us is not really to much of a concern. On top of that the owner of my company has already stated that in the event the property ever goes up for sale which realistically it will he will be purchasing it. So it is more so a long term investment.
The area the pond will be going is in a great place for runoff from rain so we are not using the well to fill up the pond but just to maintain it during the dry season.

I have done this and have found the only way it works is if the pond is full and then you can drill a well and set a small pump that is solar powered to run all of the time. It doesn't Pur out much flow but will usually keep a pond close to topped off if the pond starts out full.
Usual rates of evaporation during a hot summer on my 4 acre pond is about an inch a day.

1" at 4 acres per day is over 100K gallons of water loss per day.

Ricochet you may want to check out pond boss as that is one of the go-to forums for all things pond related. I would first start out by digging several test holes in the area where you want to build to check out soil suitability for a pond. I would also look at Web soil survey to see if you have any potential problems before you begin. The second thing is to look at the Water Well Reports below from the TCEQ. You can view depth of wells drilled in your area and look at their pumping rates to determine if they would be helpful. You also need to talk to a driller to make sure the water is even usable. In certain areas at certain depths the water could be too salty to use for any type of pond and would require a filtration system.


WebSoilSurvey

TCEQ Water Well Report Viewer

As stuards of the land, and the water beneath it, I would spend the money elsewhere.

1.Learn the exact topography of the land, to verify the pond is going in the correct place (low ground)
2. Core drill the future pond area, to verify soil type, and make sure it will even hold water.
3. If number one and number three are positive, spend SOME of the money you would have spent, on the well, to pay the Dozer man to dig deeper, and larger, if possible.

I've got a 1 1/2 surface acre pond that was put in the perfect location for run-off, has great soil for holding water, was dug deep enough to hold lots of water, and does not have a well supporting it. It has plenty of grass around it to curtail erosion, and therefore silt build up. During drought it gets low, but nowhere near low enough to give me concern. Quite simply, it works perfectly without the use of subterranean water.

CORRECT!..... A buddy of mine used to irrigate a .3ac pond on his farm with a well and over 4 years he had to both have the well made deeper and replace the pump.

I am in the excavation business and one part of our scope of work is building "Wet Ponds" - These are ponds that are built and then MUST be filled with water to saturate the clay layer liner underneath them.

We built one of these ponds 2 years ago in Austin with HOT&DRY conditions and still had to fill the pond; we hooked up a 3" fire hose to a fire hydrant meter and let it run non-stop for days & days to fill that pond per city requirements.......

The project manager went insane when the $56,000 water bill came in;I did a full audit and came to the conclusion that 50% of the water we put in that pond was being lost to evaporation...... and were talking about a 3.4ac pond here.

In the residential custom home construction in rural areas; I have personally seen one home owner burn out a well pump by simply trying to fill a newly completed swimming pool and another ran his well dry doing the same.

My point being that I would follow FiremanJG's advice and do the research on building the pond right in the first place vs. the expense of a well.

The $10-15K to put in a good well could be used to make one EXCELLENT pond with proper soil testing, slopped sides, aerator(windmill, solar or electric).

50% to evaporation or evaporation AND absorption?

You want to know what you loose to evaporation put a 5 gal bucket in the same place where nothing can knock it over or drink it and see how long it lasts.

My swimming pool only drops about an inch every seven days during the heat of the summer

There are a bunch of physics involved, but as hinted to earlier, it isn't just evaporation, but absorption as well. On top of that, a swimming pool will typically be deep with steep sides. A pond will typically thin around the edges and be more of a shallow basin. Water around the edges where it is shallow will heat up more than the water in the deeper center area, resulting in faster evaporation from the edges, something your pool likely does not experience.

On top of that is the issue of absorption which includes water that soaks into the ground and becomes groundwater again (leakage) and water that soaks into the surrounding edge areas and subsequently evaporates (muddy areas around your tank), resulting in something of a wicking effect. This wicking effect is such that saturation isn't total. As water evaporates from the ground surrounding the pond/tank, it is replenished, thereby effectively increasing your surface area and speeding your overall evaporation. Your swimming pool does not experience this.

Long term leases have many ways yo go south

Call Pawliks well service in GW. Give them some general info on the location and they should be able to give you a rough estimate. I used them a couple years ago to check out a windmill & they were reasonably priced.

this

Went with solar a couple of years back. Ran a line to an acre tank the livestock & wildlife use. Drilled down 240 feet came in just under 10K.

call Bob Lusk at Pond Boss - he is the pro of pros - he can tell you how many GPM pump you will need based on size of the pond- great guy and has done this for years. Again, having done myself exactly what you are planning, the amount of water that is needed in the summer to keep a pond full is way way more than one imagines