Re-printed by permission of the MINEOLA MONITOR
Drilling the old-fashion way
With homemade tools Robinson hopes to someday air-condition his home for free.
By GARY EDWARDS
The Monitor Staff
The next time you pay a $250.00 air-conditioning bill think about Loy Robinson. He expects to some day air-condition his home for free. That’s what can happen when drill your own water well and use 62 degree water to cool the air in your home. Robinson and his wife Shirley own and operate a small nursery, Lost Creek Plant Farm, just east of Mineola on County Road 2651, They’ve lived there for approximately two years and while their names may not be well known in Mineola, they sell products they’ve developed to a growing number of greenhouse hobbyists. Some as far away as Denmark, Africa and Australia and to those much closer, like New York, Washington State and Texas. He has been on the Michael Holigan TV show, where he showed how easy it is to create a greenhouse.
When Robinson designed an easily constructed greenhouse, shipping cost more than the greenhouse was worth so he did the next best thing. He developed a pipe bender and now sells the pipe bender and instructions on how to make a greenhouse and then ships those items to his growing customer base for less than $80.00, including shipping and handling. He expects to sell between 700 and 800 of his 14-pound pipe benders this year.
Just listening to him and his ideals can make the Energizer Bunny appear rather pedestrian? But when it comes to drilling his own water well, with equipment he made, it makes for fascinating conversation. His interest in the process began when his father gave him a drilling bit he had used to drill a well. Robinson was 20 at the time but says, “My mind wasn’t on drilling a well” in those days. “There was no sense of urgency,” he said.
As the years went by and the cost of everything natural, from water to petroleum, that sense of urgency has become a reality to him. Just weeks ago Robinson, 52, began the process of creating his tools for drilling. From fabricating the tools to drilling it was “trial and error” he says now. The tools took six days to make, the actual drilling took seven hours. Slicing through the clay and then sand, he hit water just over 17 feet beneath the surface and quit drilling at 34 feet because the supply of cold water was more than he needed. Robinson thinks he may have hit an underground spring and he knows he was lucky not to hit an iron ore bolder. That, he said would have slowed the process greatly.
He spent $300.00 on a winch and then discarded it in favor of a cement mixer with a rope wrapped around it. The cement mixer was faster. Cheap rope, he said, doesn’t work because it unravels. But no matter the learning-on-the-run approach, he now has a water system that provides enough water for his nursery and he’s drilling a second and deeper well that he expects will be followed by a third and still deeper well. Why? “This is my first well and I don’t know if I did it right or if it will run out of water.”
With his well digging in progress and the water at 62 degrees, he’s figured out a way to take to cold water and run it through coils and then blow air across the coils to cool the air for his home, he plans to build. He will then use that same water now a warmer water, to irrigate all the plants in his nursery. Solar panels and a small windmill will produce the power to run the water pump and fan needed to push the hot air across the cold coils.
He casually calls it “beneficial” to be able to calls it his home for $20 worth of electricity a month. He really likes the ideal of it not costing a thing and that’s where the solar panels and windmill come in.
Always on the lookout for a way to turn his experience into income, Robinson plans to create a “how to” set of instructions for those who might like to drill their water wells. It will, he said, be CDs and videos for those “do it yourself types.”
To learn more about them, check out their web site at www.lostcreek.net.
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