Ken Nunweiler
GROUNDwater Detection Expert
About Ken Nunweiler
Ken Nunweiler, a local British Columbia business owner, has been locating groundwater through water detection practices for most of his life. His work has helped many landowners and developers to avoid the dreaded ‘guessing game’ of drilling a dry hole – saving precious time and money.
Experienced
Over 65 years of experience with locating successfully producing well sites.
Professional
I will make this process professional, efficient and informative for you.
Motivated
Let an experienced water finding expert help you save time, stress, and money!
Who Am I?
My name is Ken Nunweiler. I grew up on a small family farm in Saskatchewan with one sister and three brothers. I lived on the farm with my family , where we used well water for our daily household needs, for irrigation, and for 100 head of cattle.
The universe acts in unusual ways. The good Lord gave me some talents, but the important one he gave me was to sense the energy of water underground.
As I was growing up my father was a farmer and a well digger, and he preferred to drill at well sites where someone had dowsed. He used a boring machine to dig holes that were lined with special wood cut to make a circle inside the hole, and prevent the walls from caving in. This supplemental income was a part-time job for him, and he only dug wells after the field and harvest work was done.
These well drilling days for my father were in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As a young boy I watched men use all different types of tools to help them find the water underground. I tried all the tools they tried, and eventually found that the forked branch was the only one that seemed to tell me something. At that age I did not know what it was telling me, but I would soon find out.
To dig the wells my dad used a team of horses that walked in circles beside a drill tower that contained a gear box. Today, massive drill rigs are a spin off of the early oil service rigs and the rigs that drilled shallow oil wells. They are loaded with drive engines, air compressors, and water pumps, and are a giant step forward in handling the casings and drill steel that is used to make high speed holes.
For me, finding an underground aquifer and centring the drill rig on the stream is the easy part. The challenge comes with all the high speed drill equipment and getting the driller to stop at the right depth. With these high speed machines a driller can quickly and easily drill through a 10 foot aquifer stream without realizing. So it is my job to work with the driller to inform them of the correct depth and trust in my skills to accurately locate the top and bottom of the stream. The thicker the stream, the more water it will produce.
"My body is sensitive to the energy of water, and I can accurately locate it down to a depth of about 500 feet or 200 m."
- Ken Nenweiler
Expert Groundwater Detector
A Recent Story for You...
Let me tell you about the last well I helped locate, and how we solved our challenges along the way. It was in the summer of 2020, and I had been asked to locate a place to drill a well for some friends who were planning to build three kilometres away from my home. They had bought four acres of land with the intention to build both a home site and shop site. I first checked the four acres to find the best well location, knowing that whichever site we chose had to be above the proposed septic field or at least 100 feet away. I found two aquifers that seemed to be running close to a power pole for the home, shop, and well house.
I knew we were headed for trouble when I showed the drillers my chosen location and told him what I expected him to find. The first words out of his mouth were, “there’s no water here, and I don’t believe in water witching or dowsing”. That was our first clue of trouble to come. Reluctantly, he set up his rig and the next day started drilling. When I arrived the next day I observed something unusual. There was a huge pile of topsoil about 10′ high and 15 or 20 feet away from the drill hole, right where the drillers exhaust pipe faced, with little rivers of water running down the sides.
When I asked the driller about the water on the topsoil, he told me that he used water to flush out the cuttings with air, and that he had put the water in to get the cuttings out. It was my suspicion that he had drilled right through the first aquifer, but despite my concerns he just carried on drilling.
I was there when he went through the second aquifer. He was below 90 feet, we saw no extra water, and so he kept drilling. The driller was using a diamond drill bit to drill, which could drill soft material and rock. Then, at about 220 feet deep he encountered a large boulder, and the casing became stuck. He was unable to drive the casing through the rock. Drilling without the casing is risky – a cave in could cause the drill bit to get jammed and he could lose it in the hole. So he stopped and declared it a dry hole, folded up his rig, left the steel casing, and moved on.
I thought to myself, “now what?!” This would’ve been my first dry hole! But, not so fast. You’re dealing with a stubborn German. It would take a bigger challenge than this to knock me off the wagon!
I went back to the drill site and re-checked my water depth, which had not changed. I started making phone calls looking for someone with a tool we could lower down the hole to cut the casing and allow water to flow into the well. But, I ended up finding someone who could do something much better. They had a tool we could lower into the hole and cut slotted grooves in the casing. Jackpot. The casing would remain intact and the slots would let the water into the well!
Peter from Corley Drilling at Salmon Arm brought the equipment to the well site, lowered down the cutter, and cut slots where I had located the aquifers. Right away we could hear water running into the well and echoing up the pipe, sounding like you were pouring water into a puddle from a pitcher. The water ran for three weeks. I then took my rope and tested for water at the bottom of the pipe, and found that the bottom of the 230 foot hole was dry.
Now what? We had water but it was draining away from the pipe. Our second driller, Peter, said he knew exactly what to do. He purchased some bentonite – a clay product. He filled the bottom of the well with sand until the bottom of the steel pipe had sand in it. Then, he poured the clay product into the hole to make a 5 foot tall plug and left it to cure.
Several days later, I re-checked the well and measured the water had collected up to 40 feet from the top. This meant there was about 150 feet of water in the well – we celebrated in a water dance! Even better, when I checked again in a couple of days I could not believe my eyes. The water was even closer to the top of the well. Not only was the 230 gallons in the pipe full of water, but there was also hydraulic pressure in the aquifer, allowing the water to rise to 15 feet from the top of the well. It was a great success! And definitely not a dry hole.
The original driller never phoned me to apologize for telling me he didn’t believe in witching and that someone could find water accurately. He was determined to prove me wrong, but he couldn’t sway me who knows exactly what I’m talking about. When Peter tested the well for flow, we found that it produced more than an adequate amount of water for both the home and the shop. It was with great difficulty that we recovered this well, but trusting the skill and talent that I have developed over half a century of hard work eventually led to another successful well.
Peter’s work to recover the well was expensive, but less expensive than finding another location for a hole and drilling that one, too. The first driller still invoiced full price for the dry hole, but found it was very expensive to have the cost of recovery subtracted from his invoice. He got paid about 1/3 of what he had asked.