 | Presents... |
Water Dowsing Finding Water by Rod Hendricks See Rod's Web Site... |
| Presents... |
Water Dowsing Finding Water by Rod Hendricks See Rod's Web Site... |
| Rod Hendricks: I've been finding wells since I was 6 years old. Let me start with a little bit of history about how I got into it. My dad's been drilling wells since 1959. I was born in 1965 so I kind of grew up in the drilling business. Dad taught me to find water using brass rods when I first started following him around on the drilling site. It used to be kind of a neat little hat trick when I was a kid. We'd go out onto a job site, jump out, and Dad would say, Rod, run out there and work us up a good location. Well, of course, the customer thought that was funnier than anything, watching this little kid out there wondering around with a brass rod in each of his hands. After I came back I'd say, "Yup, Up found one." Then Dad would take the rods and say, "Is it over here?" And I'Upay, "Yup." Then Dad would find the same exact spot that I did. I get a lot of questions ask me about how and why it works. All I have is an opinion. Nothing has ever seemed strange to me about finding underground water. Finding water is just like tying your shoe to me. Up lived with it my whole life. And I'Upine tuned it as I'veUpten lessons from different people. There isn't a mystery in my mind about why it works. The metal rods to me are nothing more than a visual aid to tell you what your body already knows. We only use somewhere 7% and 9% of our brain's capacity. There's that other 90 percent of our gray matter that's not really being used for a lot that we know of. I think the human body is a lot more in tune with the things that go on around us than we understand. Our subconscious mind can sense things that aren't readily apparent to our conscious minds. We don't use enough of our brain capacity to be able to comprehend this and really understand what we're feeling and have a hard time sorting the different messages out. Whether it will work for a person or not depends on what kind of mental block they have in place. I've only had a handful of customers that it wouldn't work for. When I find a spot to drill for a customer, I'll hand him the rods and let him play with them. The very few that it didn't work for were dead set against believing it could work. To me, the brass rods are like the gas gage in a car. The gage tells you how much gas is in the tank. The device for finding water isn't nearly as important as the person doing it. The only thing the rods are there for is as a visual aid for you to see what you're already feeling. Of course, this is personal opinion on my part after 29 years experience. I grew up using brass rods. But I've also done it with coat hangers. Coat hangers work just as good but they are kind of flimsy and don't stay in your hand as well. A 1/4 inch brass rod is a nice stiff rod and stays in the hand nicely. Some people have used a forked branch off a willow tree. The reason we use brass rods is because they are easy to keep. You don't have to worry about going out and having to cut something down. I believe it doesn't matter what you use. Use whatever you feel comfortable with. One guy believed it would only work with a green branch from a cherry tree. That guy had this idea cemented so deeply in his mind that for him, he was right, only a green cherry tree branch worked work for him. I also like brass rods because that is how my dad taught me. I think it's easier to do it that way than with a stick. I've seen another guy with a coiled piece of bailing wire. He wrapped the wire around something like a round medicine bottle with a straight section of wire on the end of it pointing straight down. He had to hold onto it in a special way, across the back end of the wire then he'd count the bobs. I saw another guy who was looking for an artesian well or a flowing well. So he took water out of another flowing well, put it into a Bayer aspirin bottle and taped it onto the end of a stick so it would find a flowing well for him. That didn't work. Once I saw a 96 years old guy from Sweden use a silver pocket watch. He did a really good job. He dangled his watch from it's chain and walked around with it. When it started making circles he knew he was over a water source. So, I've seen a whole bunch of different things. Two weeks ago I drilled a well up in the hills. The man and his son were standing there waiting on me when I arrived. The man was about 45 years old and his son was about 16 years old. We were ‘talking away' as I looked for a good drilling location for them. After I found the spot, the guy said, "Let me try that." He grabbed those rods and sure as anything, right in the same spot where they crossed for me they crossed for him. Then we gave them to his son and he roamed the entire hillside looking for water and marking different underground streams. Neither one of those two people had ever even seen it before. Both of them picked it up just like ducks to water. You don't have to be a special person to do this. Granted, the knowledge helps to give you an idea of what some of the possibilities are. During all of my well drilling I've only missed on two wells. This was 15 years ago, one right after the other. On the first site we hit a clay strip about 80 feet down. When we stopped drilling at about 500 feet we were in that same clay strip. Then I looked for another location, drilled it and got the same thing. We hit clay at 80 feet and were still in the same clay layer when we stopped at 500 feet. This was the occasion when we ask the old guy who immigrated from Sweden to come up. He walked up to the first well with his silver watch and said, "You guys had nothing but clay, didn't you." We said, "Yup." Then he walked over to the second well and said, "You had the same thing here, you had clay all the way." We said, "Yes." Then he said, "You weren't focusing on what you were looking for. The clay is naturally damp and has moisture in it, and that's why you found the first two spots." Then he walked over to the other side of the property and said, "If you'd have drilled here you would have hit water." So the things this gentleman said got me a little more in tune. But I've had many other learning experiences as well. We had an older guy from Oklahoma that worked for us about 8 years ago. One day he said, "So you just use those brass rods to find water? You can use them to find anything." I said, "No, no no. Brass rods are for water." He said, "Brass rods are for anything you want. It doesn't matter what you are trying to find, what does matter is what you are making a mental picture of." So he set up a little demonstration with a piece of black poly pipe that was laying there, a block of wood, an old tin can, and a ring that he took off and laid down. He walked from one item to the next, focusing his mind on the ring. When he got over the ring his rods crossed. Expanding my vision a little bit, I've used this method now to find several different things. I've been called out to find septic systems, water pipes and gas lines. About a month ago I was called out by a guy to find a water line as he was confused as to where it ran for his house. I initially started finding the water pipe by running "water line" through my mind. I crossed one and marked it out. Then I thought, "I'll come from the other direction and make another mark, then figure the water line lies somewhere between those two marks." Next, I went to the edge of the yard with my rods down then returning, I picked my rods back up again and started thinking "water line" again. Expecting the rods to cross in the same place, I was surprised when the rods crossed five feet away from the first mark. "Wait a second here." I took another step and they uncrossed then crossed again over the first spot. "We got two water lines here." Then I went through and marked out both water lines for him. He said, "I'm going to dig them up. Are they plastic, metal or what?" So, I went across the two lines again but this time I was concentrating on "steel pipe." When I crossed the first one nothing happened. When I passed over the second one the rods crossed. "Steel Water Line." So I thought, the other water line must be black poly because that's all we run in this country - black poly or steel. But nothing happened as I centered my mind on ‘black poly' as I walked over the spot. So I went back over it again thinking "white PVC pipe," not knowing what else it could be. This time the rods crossed. We dug down and connected to the steel line as he was sure the steel line was the pipe that brought the water into his house. Later, a lady came over whose father built the subdivision. Talking to her I said, "This is kind of strange. There's two water lines buried here. One is steel and I think the other one's white PVC pipe." She said, "Yes, my dad went through and put PVC water line to each lot so when people built their houses all they had to do was tap into it. What he didn't realize at the time was when you sell someone a one acre piece not everyone is going to put their house right in the center of it." And because of this, they didn't even mention the PVC pipe when people started building their houses. I already mentioned the guy who felt he needed a green branch from a cherry tree. He wondered all over his hill and said, "Ok, here's the water." I grabbed my brass rods. "Here's a vein," I said. "There's another vein over here and there's a vein up here." "Nope," he said, "The only one I can find is this one right down here. It's the only vein on the property." So I ask him, "Tell me, what are you focusing on?" He said, "I'm looking for ‘clear, cool spring water.'" There was a difference here. I was just looking for ‘underground water flowing in an aquifer.' This guy was looking for clear, cool spring water. We drilled where he wanted and it was only 20 feet down to a natural underground spring that didn't have quite enough pressure to come to the surface on it's own. The reason he only found this spot was because of the mental picture he had in his head. He had already walked over several prevalent sites with plenty of water but hadn't found them. The valley I live in has one of the fastest moving aquifers in the whole world but only moves 2 inches a year. It's more like a great big underground pond. You'll hear people say, "The well driller came out and tapped right into an underground river." Well, that's not quite how things work. Underground rock is normally fractured or broken in different places. Water is going to take the path of least resistance. Ground water is the same as surface water in that it will also flow in the path of least resistance. If you turn a hose on the water will move through the path of least resistance through the hose to it's opening. Water in the ground does the same thing, following the path of least resistance though the cracks and fissures in the rocks. Many underground aquifers are in very tight formations such as shale, basalt or granite. You'll find the water will follow the cracks and fissures through the rock. The whole purpose of the rods is to find the cracks and fissures where the water is moving through the rock formations, then tap into that rather than going down into solid rock where no water is found. There have been times I have drilled into a crack that's only a foot wide and I'll get 10-15 gallons a minute out of it. Then there are other times when I've drilled into a crevice that's 8 feet across and have only got 3 gallons a minute out of it. But how deep does that crack go? Is it only 1/8 of an inch thick or is it two feet thick? I tell the customers we will pick them a location but I don't guarantee how deep it's going to go or how fast it is going to flow. Although when searching for it, I do form mental pictures in my mind of how it will produce; how deep it's going to go and things like that. I do this by saying within my mind, "The water is 20 feet down." If the rods don't cross I make another statement in my mind going deeper and do this until the rods cross. Forming different pictures in my mind, I can also determine about how much the potential well will produce. I'm not real accurate on this aspect of searching for water and think it's probably because I've lived my whole life with my dad telling me ‘you can't do that.' So I probably have my own mind block on getting that information. We just drilled a well in Idaho Falls for a guy named Phil about 3 months ago. He needed 25 gallons a minute to run his sprinkler system. I went through his whole field and he followed me around while I yacked to him about it and how it worked. I found one spot on his property that I felt would produce between 20 and 23 gallons per minute. Then, Phil walked all over his property with my rods and found streams and did the gallon per minute test as well. When he came back to that same spot, he told me he thought it would do 26 gallons per minute. We drilled the well and found that it produced 26 gallons per minute. Two or three years ago I was ask to drill a well in Teton Valley, Idaho, up on in a subdivision they were putting on top of a mountain. The guy called me and ask, "How much is it going to cost to drill a 1,100 foot well? I sit 900 feet off the valley floor." I said, "Your elevation above flat ground doesn't necessarily mean you will have to go down further than the valley floor. We could hit water before that." After finding a location I said, "Don't expect to get more than 12-15 gallons a minute." He needed 30 gallons per minute to get permission to build the subdivision. We drilled the hole down 750 feet and he had 12 gallons per minute on the button. Searching for another location I found the same thing. I said, "I think you are throwing your money away. You're never going to find more than 12 gallons per minute on this mountain." We drilled in this second location and we got 14 gallons per minute. This guy was beside himself and didn't know what to do as he'd already invested all his money in this project. Asking me what I thought he should do, I suggested he call Jim in Pocatello. "He's going to charge you to come up and find your well but who knows, maybe he will come up with something more than what I've found." Jim came up and marched all over the mountain and found a convergence of several streams. Then he stated, "You can't get 30 gallons per minute but you should be able to get 29-29.5 gallons per minute, but it's going to be right on the edge." Jim said we'd start into the water at 540 feet down and would pick up more water until we got down to 690 feet. Then after that, he said, we wouldn't find any more water so we might as well stop at 700 feet. We laughed and thought that was pretty funny. When drilling the well, we struck water at 536 feet. The last zone of water we encountered was at 689 feet down and went out of that right into some really hard rock where we stopped. We lowered a pump down into the well and found that it pumped 29.5 gallons per minute, close enough to 30 gpm. Jim did perfectly on that one but on other jobs down in Pocatello he blew them all. But on that hill in Teton Valley I stood there with my mouth open in amazement. He wrote it all down on a paper of what we could expect before the hole was ever drilled. If you look at our lithologic log compared to his pre-hole estimate of the site, they both match each other almost perfectly. Jim used brass rods to locate the water, then he walked off in a line from that location and when the rods crossed again he measured the distance between the two points and that gave him his depth. I've never seen it done this way before. After I find a location, I'll mark the exact spot with a wooden stake. When my helper with the truck comes, he finds my stake with the word ‘well' written on it, pulls the rig right over the top of that stake and drills the well. I think anyone who is open minded enough to give it a chance can do this. I drill 150 wells a year. I use my brass rods on about 50 of them. Out of those 50 wells a year we have been drilling since 1977, we always, always give the customer, if he's on site, the opportunity to play with the rods. So, figure 20 people per year have picked up my rods and have played with them over the last 20 years. That's 400 people. Out of those people, there's been maybe 10 people who couldn't do it. And each of those people had a huge mental block against it. It was nothing but a bunch of hooey to them and they wouldn't permit their body to tune into it. When it comes to finding water in this way, I don't think I'm special. I've been playing with it since I was a kid. Anyone with a good attitude about it and a pair of coat hangers can find water. You can't sit there and say, "This is never going to work. This is stupid, this is hokey, it'll never work." Guess what! If you think that way, it won't. This is one place where the axiom, "Whether you think you can or you think you can't, you're right," bears true. But if you think, "I want to drill a well. They cost $5,000 and I want to make sure there's water. Let's try this. It'll work." And boom, it's going to work.
Rod Hendricks |
How To Find Water With Rods:
Take two brass rods 3 feet long. The diameter may be as small as a 12 gauge wire or about the same diameter wire as a stiff clothes hanger all the way up to a 1/4 inch diameter rod. Bend the last four inches on one side of each rod at a 90 degree angle so the rod forms an "L." In each hand, old the short leg of each rod, keeping this part of the rod as vertical as possible with the long part of the rod on the top of the hand. If you are doing this correctly the long end of the rod should be running parallel with flat ground.
Now, go outside. Using your mind to form a picture of what you are seeking, slowly walk back and forth over the known object and observe the rods crossing and uncrossing. Outside your house there should be several things you can concentrate on - your water line, sewer line, natural gas line or underground electrical line. When you feel comfortable with this, try going out into an open area where you don't know where things are and try finding veins of water. I can only expect you will be as amazed as I was with this most interesting wonder.
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This information may be used by you freely for non-commercial use with my name and E-mail address attached.
Revised: 1 Nov 00