OT - Need a sealant to repair dug well casing

I have a dug well about 20' deep. I had a coliform bacteria problem that I thought was caused by tree root growing through a casing seam. Root was about 3/8" OD and maybe 10 feet long. I shocked the well with bleach then pumped it out. As it was draining, the water level passed a seam about halfway down and water poured into the well about as much as a strong garden hose would, and a couple of much smaller inward leaks. After a couple of minutes the leaks stopped.
I need a sealant that is 1) food grade, 2) wet area application, 3) very little or no dry time.
I don't know for sure if the bacteria was caused by the tree root or surface ground water, but I'm fixing anything I can see hoping I'll solve it.
I've looked at swimming pool products, even Flex-Seal "as seen on TV" but I can't find a food grade product.
The casings are concrete about 50" in diameter and 4 or 5 feet tall.
Thanks for any suggestions.

How about can foam ?

I think that the options are
1) Drill a new well with a new sleeve
2) Replace the casing (may be hard to get the old casing out, though - easier to drill new).
3) Use a casing repair sleeve.

I don't think any "magic case sealant" exists. At least that will work. If the casing is leaking at multiple points its' probably toast in that area and has no structural integrity. Sealing with anything that doesn't repair the structural strength and integrity to the casing will fail. Ala the multiple posts you'll find on PM "Can I fix the head mounting casting on my milling machine with JB Weld?". The casing repair sleeve is usually fixed in place with a resin - epoxy? - I think.

I found the following a bit wandering, but with some useful info:
Water Well Casing Leak Symptoms, Diagnosis, Repairs - leaks in the main well bore, pipe, or casing

+1 on a full repair, sounds like the casing is at end of life and you can count on it failing somewhere else soon enough even if your patch job works.

Companies rehab sewer lines with a cure in place liner. Call a water main cleaning service, there must be something similar.

maynah said:

I have a dug well about 20' deep. I had a coliform bacteria problem that I thought was caused by tree root growing through a casing seam. Root was about 3/8" OD and maybe 10 feet long. I shocked the well with bleach then pumped it out. As it was draining, the water level passed a seam about halfway down and water poured into the well about as much as a strong garden hose would, and a couple of much smaller inward leaks. After a couple of minutes the leaks stopped.
I need a sealant that is 1) food grade, 2) wet area application, 3) very little or no dry time.
I don't know for sure if the bacteria was caused by the tree root or surface ground water, but I'm fixing anything I can see hoping I'll solve it.
I've looked at swimming pool products, even Flex-Seal "as seen on TV" but I can't find a food grade product.
The casings are concrete about 50" in diameter and 4 or 5 feet tall.
Thanks for any suggestions.

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Groundwater did yah. Roots take. They don't deliver. And they have immune systems to resist being et of. Good ones, too!

Concrete goods begat concrete patch. Simple enough.

The patching, standard for over 2,000 years - that we have decent RECORDS for...longer yet, probable - has been "an Iron source" in with "a cement". Greek and Persians, Gypsum sometimes. Roman engineers near two DOZEN different chemistries mostly burnt lime.

Your one is a common need to an "Acquarius" ....Rome's equivalent to an RPE waterworks guru. They used a pinkish volcanic soil with high Iron content mixed it water-starved - very! Then hand rammed and hammered it into the gaps as a sorta thick paste.

Water can be turned back in to make use of a mission-critical acqueduct "At Once". This mix will NOT wash or scour out. It has already taken holt and will continue to gain strength and expand to seal the gap even under running water, not just standing water.

Works easily as well, present-day, backwoods America or all over Asia - as anything we have (re)invented since Rome fell ..,or China ... did not. Chinese, ancient OR modern, know their Old Skewl cements and ceramics also.

It is exactly how we kept the big "walk-in, work-in" cisterns on the farm in good shape. Hydraulic cement. Lime, but not-only as general sealant/whitewash biocide over.

Or how I repaired the cracked concrete of a "meter-box" housing to put a big SE grin on the face of the Loudoun Water Field guy a few year ago.

Start with pressure washing the mud and biological slime out of the breaks. Good idea to cut-back failed material by dssolving it back to loose aggregate with Muriatic acid etch... so the new "ceramic" will bond well to its clean "cousin".

Yah can mix a decent analog to what an Acquarius had with "hydraulic cement", bought as powder, AND NOT premix jelly, plus a dose of latex-enhanced "thinset" rapid-set sold for ceramic flooring, and a compatible grout "sanded" to bulk it and make it easier to ram. The dry grout powder goes IN WITH the mix, not smeared-over it, later.

I tip-in a touch of straight Portland Cement.. sorta by "feel". It's an adhesive. Good one. But sparingly. It adds strength to a bond, but also increases vunerabilty to shrinkage cracking if not kept within due bounds.

Aside from some unavoidably TEDIOUS labour of GOOD pre-prep - do NOT skip that, it is the primary determinant of bond longevity- the patch itself is a one-STEP, and DONE process.

Keep it water starved. It will FIND all the water it needs to complete the chemical reaction WITHOUT shrinkage-cracking.. even if it takes MORE THAN two thousand years. Your one has groundwater back of it, it will cure right away and hold WELL.

Expect, and INSIST ON, need to ram or hammer it into place.
That is crucial as the key to not having shrinkage cracking.

Local MOVEMENT, or lack, thereof, thereafter will set the life.
Two years. Two hundred years, Two thousand years.
I kid you not. Rome knew their cements easily that well. China, too.

Why mess with anything less durable (foams? PLASTICS? F**K ME! them's just money-masturbatory!) ... when the Roman way is also the CHEAP and even easy way?

Nothing to add here, but good clean water at 20 feet! Wowsers! And bad water in between 20 and the surface. We used water from our irrigation well for drinking for years. The water comes from perforations between 2300 and 2375 feet down in an abandoned oil well.
The cost of digging a 20 foot well has to be cheap, making the seal to keep bad shallow water from following the casing down, that is another story.

My first bet would be Rockite, a very strong very fast setting repair concrete. If you mix it with less water it will make a stiffer mix (that may still slump a bit and need to be tooled while initially setting up). The stuff is "set" in about 15 minutes and cures fully in about 24 hrs.

I use it for all kinds of repairs including recently to firm up a newell post that had been cemented into the floor when the house was built and loosened a bit as the wood shrank. I also use it where weeds have forced their way up near the edge of an asphalt driveway. I drill and then pour Rockite to about 1/4" from the surface and then come back later with driveway trowel patch.

You need bentonite that’s how we seal well casings pour in and it swells up making a seal. https://www.baroididp.com/content/dam/idp/Data_Sheets/A_H/HOLEPLUG.pdf

true temper said:

You need bentonite that’s how we seal well casings pour in and it swells up making a seal. https://www.baroididp.com/content/dam/idp/Data_Sheets/A_H/HOLEPLUG.pdf

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That was going to be my suggestion for step 2. Without patching of holes on the inside first some of the bentonite (diatomaceous earth) will intrude into the well. It works well for sealing cracks against water but holes need to be plugged. Bentonite is usually mixed with water first and injected under pressure. I watched them do a neighbor's foundation many years ago.

true temper said:

You need bentonite that’s how we seal well casings pour in and it swells up making a seal. https://www.baroididp.com/content/dam/idp/Data_Sheets/A_H/HOLEPLUG.pdf

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"The casings are concrete about 50" in diameter and 4 or 5 feet tall."
What are you gonna hold the clay back with ?

Possibly the bentonite could be injected from the exterior of the casings? This sounds like a job for a well specialist. I suspect they
will say, dig up the upper sections of casings and re-install them with sealant inside the joints.

I am imagining this to be a section of stacked rings for this to work.

Around here for deep wells with submersible pumps, if you pull the stack out and handle it, it
will fail the colliform test. If you have ground water intruding at the level you mentioned, you will have a tough
time getting it to pass.

Drinking water well? Consider UV treatment.

FredC said:

Nothing to add here, but good clean water at 20 feet! Wowsers! And bad water in between 20 and the surface. We used water from our irrigation well for drinking for years. The water comes from perforations between 2300 and 2375 feet down in an abandoned oil well.
The cost of digging a 20 foot well has to be cheap, making the seal to keep bad shallow water from following the casing down, that is another story.

Click to expand...

Cased my last one - doubled the wall of the steel asked for so as to have longer life - into a drilled bore in the top of a stable rock formation at 330 foot below GL. Bored through that formation to pick-up out of a "sand" that was part of the Potomac aquifer.. and still well above MSL.

"City" water since. Nowhere near as good, but they have damned good folk keeping after it, so I no longer have to do.

Tradeoffs.

It is actually the "municipal sewage treatment" system on the same bill as give me greater savings. AND peace of mind.

So long as they don't go all "Green New Steal" on me and just AOC crotch-perfume the sewage, run it back in a pumped LOOP, and call it good because Adam Schiff SAYS it is so, anyway!

I would drop in new casing maybe 3' diameter and fill the void with concrete. Vibrate it down as you pour. The new casing can be temporary wood or cardboard. Or buy a 20 foot long culvert pipe.
Or start at the bottom and build a cinder block casing inside the old one and fill the blocks and the void with concrete.
It will get expensive if you use a 4" casing and fill the void with yards and yards of concrete. That is why I recommend three foot diameter. Add plastizer to the mix so it packs well.
Bil lD

A tree root is sanitary. Wood cutting boards actually kill bacteria and are more sanitary then plastic. Any bacteria came from water leaking in around the root or the casing seam the root opened.
I am not aware of any infection you can get from eating plants. Molds and fungus on the plants can infect you but not the plant itself.
Bil lD

Bill D said:

I would drop in new casing maybe 3' diameter and fill the void with concrete. Vibrate it down as you pour. The new casing can be temporary wood or cardboard. Or buy a 20 foot long culvert pipe.
Or start at the bottom and build a cinder block casing inside the old one and fill the blocks and the void with concrete.
It will get expensive if you use a 4" casing and fill the void with yards and yards of concrete. That is why I recommend three foot diameter. Add plastizer to the mix so it packs well.
Bil lD

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Mother nature . and human Charlie-Fox - long ago broke me off the habit of "dug" wells in favour of drilled & full-casing all the way as a more predictable go and generally safer if not also less costly.

Last "dug" ones were kinda comical.

PA&E had the fire-fighting contract, Long Binh post, RVN.

Head guy and I spent a good deal of time co-ordination over prep and training for "special" fires, my Oxy & Acetylene production unit ...and/or all the other depot-stored flammable, toxic, both, or neither odds and sods of compressed gases I had Safety responsibility for.

Now "shit happens" in a combat zone, so HE - prudently enough - wanted a good well right ON his fire dept facility. Just in case even a failing enemy assault also made it hard to get water to use to fight fires.

Seemed like a good idea at the time, yah? I mean MY outfit had a dug well. Lined with recycled steel napalm shipping containers, end to end. Then again we wuz on the edge of a rubber plantation, down low and hitting the aquifer of the RIVER, even all the way through the "dry season"..

PA&E fire fighting HQ sat atop a HILL! Second-tallest one we owned!

His staff were essentially ALL South Korean Army veterans.

Tough cookies. Fit. Whip smart. What they could not repair wasn't much worth a mention - or they would just MAKE stuff. Asia's version of Appalachian Mountain boys in a way. Or even the Swiss?

So.. "spare time" they are driving down this "dream well". Standard GI precast concrete pipe sections right around 3-foot diameter, and down an ignorant rope goes one of these slender (bigger than Viets- they grew up with good food and low/NO parasites..) and superbly fit Korean athletes to dig enough to drop the stack and add one more section atop. Mind "potable" is not on the menu. Dirty water will do jest fine.

Luck would have it, they hit rock.. Now.. these guys are ROK ground combat trained veterans, and of fair tough and competent army. So they don't much bother their bosses with petty shit s long as they can "JFDI" it themselves.

So.. "rock"? BFD.

They just went and drew .. boxes of frag grenades... and TNT blocks.

Nobody got hurt. They DID know their demo.

Just not a lot about soils geology nor concrete pipe.

It ended well.

It didn't end "as a" well!

Yabutt ! The local sewer "authority" ran a force main (that's pressurized turds) back up out of a valley
to the main line.

8" o-ring plastic pipe, right past the community water well...the one that was dug with a B-H 20h...
maybe a 30' deep aquifer (nice gravel ground).

No double wall on that force main.

I would go the thermite and scottl way of concrete. Rockite or others like it are expanding cement, pour stone is another name. If it were mine I would put a pipe nipple in the hole with something threadded or welded so it will stay in the patch when dry. This will relieve the water pressure from the patch as it cures. Then you can cap it or put a valve on it, that might be usefull later to check ground water level or ??

Get a drilled well put in, and completely plug the old one.

thermite said:

It is actually the "municipal sewage treatment" system on the same bill as give me greater savings. AND peace of mind.

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That's what I tell folks when we drive downwind of th county treatment plant - that's the sweetest smell ever because it means I don't have to maintain my own system!

Also it's tertiary treatment - one reason the Hudson river is cleaning up over the years. Long ago river towns had a pipe that just emptied into the river. What this also means is when a separate sanitary sewer was installed, the other system became storm water runoff. So now separate, NOT combined systems.