Borehole water quality advice wanted please

[cliveshep]

My wife and I are moving, hopefully soon, from the UK. She wants to live in possibly the crescent area formed around Nakhon Pathum, Patham Thani, Ayuttaya, Nakhon Nayok. Her logic is that because of the floods property/land will be cheaper in that zone and if we live close to major roads and towns rooms to rent will be viable.. I like Kanchanaburi province, near the lake but as she wants to do a room for rent business and that being important to her I bow to my beloved's wishes in the matter.

Reading on this forum about wells, municipal water, boreholes, rainwater harvesting etc and knowing full well from previous experiences the cost of utilities in LOS and the uncertainty of regularity and cleanliness of municipal supplies leads me to the conclusion that a borehole will be the way to go for us.

Leaving aside all possible issues of licensing borehole extraction etc can anyone advise on water quality in that part of LOS please? i.e is the idea a dead duck because of the iron contamination I've read about elsewhere or is borehole water in Patham Thani region out to and around Ayuttaya/Nakhon Nayok of reasonable quality.

Has anyone got and is using a borehole for water in that region?

[PattayaClub]

Unfortunately, I can only instruct on borehole water quality in Phitsanulok. But if I may stray from that topic, I'll offer something that may be of interest to your beloved.

If she wants a run of the mill guest house, yes, she may want to be in the "thick of things." But my (Thai) brother-in-law built a beautiful little complex consisting of little one room teak cottages, with attached bathroom in back. He now has about 20 of these little cottages. He built them in succession as he saved money. He beautifully landscaped the property.

The deal is, he built them in Uthai Thani way in there at the foot of the mountain and the gateway to the big national park there. He's definitely off the beaten path. But he is chock full from Thursday through Sunday every week with people from Bangkok. There are a lot of people in BKK that like a weekend getaway, and his resort is perfect and quite popular. Almost all of his constant business is repeat.

Now, if you had a place on the lake in Kanchanaburi and did it up nice like my brother-in-law did, I think you'd get the same kind of business as my brother-in-law gets. Kanchanaburi is a very popular weekend getaway for Bangcockians. You CAN have your cake and eat it too!

Just a thought. And when you get here, if you would like to go see his operation and talk to him, you can PM me and I'll give you gps coordinates and contact information.

[chiang mai]

I'm not sure about the logic of living in that crescent etc but regardless, boreholes et al:

In Chiang Mai, and doubtless similar elsewhere in Thailand I imagine, anything below 35 meters needs a permit, expect to pay circa 100k baht for a 100 metre borehole. Under forty metres you can expect lots of problems with rust hence the water is only usable for gardens unless treated first - expect to pay 15/30k baht for twenty metres. On a cheaper front, water in the ground is easy to harvest, just dig a deep hole and let it accumulate but again, usable only for gardens and a variable supply.

So, a deep borehole will give you decent quality and good supply but at a cost and with municipal water available very cheaply, the only problem to overcome is continuity of supply - perhaps storage tanks solves that problem for you?

We have all three, government supply which is stored in 2x1,000 litre tanks and filtered before entering the house, a shallow well that is klong fed for garden sprinklers and a deeper drilled well as backup for a large garden which honestly, we only use half a dozen times each year.

By contrast, my wife's family home in Sukhothai uses a thirty metre borehole for everything, simply because there is no municipal supply. We get the water tested about once a year and there haven't been problems with quality but the well does run dry during the dry season.

Hope that helps.