Bags of gold paydirt let you try gold panning in the comfort of your own home.
The hobby of gold panning is experiencing a surge in popularity. Shows like Gold Rush and White Water are sending first time panners out into the UK wilderness, hoping to strike Alaska sized nuggets. Gold panning in the UK might not be as serious, industrialised, or productive as other countries, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give it a shot.
What’s the easiest way to try gold panning yourself? Doing it at home, in a bucket of water in your garden, using gold paydirt which you know is going to produce.
How do you Pan for Gold at Home?
It is far easier to pan for gold in your own home than you think it is. You will need only a few things:
1. A gold pan, preferably in green or black since these colours show up the gold best. If you want to go all out check out the XL models.
2. A snuffer bottle, which is a bottle with a nozzle on the end you can use to suck up the gold particles. You might want tweezers, too.
3. A basin or bucket of water – you don’t want to put dirt down your pipes!
4. And a bag of paydirt.
What is Gold Paydirt?
Gold paydirt is a package which contains soil, gravel, gold, and even gemstones or rocks. These bags are guaranteed to contain gold, therefore giving you a taste of gold fever.
Bags of paydirt come with cautionary tales, however. Fake suppliers will paint copper or hematite gold so that it looks like gold nuggets or flakes. In reality, if the value of the gold contained in the bag is larger than the price of it, the seller would be making a loss.
Paydirt won’t get you rich. It’s not what you saw on Gold Rush. These bags contain soil, gravel, and a few flakes of gold. They give you the experience of seeing gold in your pan for the first time, so that you know what you are doing when you come to do it in the river.
Where to Buy Gold Paydirt that you can Trust?
We went on a mission for this article, desperate to find the names of pay dirt providers that you can trust. We managed to find 2. Just 2 names. The other recommendation we made was based on the best rated gold pay dirt providers on Amazon. Here are our top picks and user reviewed products.
1 – Goldwise UK
This is a company we know personally. The founder of Goldwise Paydirt supplies Scottish gold inside paydirt which has come from the rivers and streams around this country. He is well-known on the gold panning circuits and is an all round nice guy. If we were shopping for paydirt, that is who we would go to, first and foremost. Goldwise established back in 2011 and prospect for their gold right here in Scotland. If you buy a bag of paydirt from them, it is guaranteed Scottish.
2 – Klesh Gold
Klesh gold are a Colorado based gold paydirt supplier over in the US. One of our TikTok followers recommended them as their usual source of paydirt. Since they are in the UK, the bags can take a while to arrive. The gold is collected from Clear Creek, Cache Creek, and other placer gold locations in the state. They allow you to choose if you want beginner – black sand free – or expert level paydirt. That’s a nice touch. You can even find them on Amazon, too.
3 – Sluiceboy Prospecting Gold Paydirt
Sluiceboy offer a 1lb bag of paydirt for a great rate. For whatever reason they somehow deliver this to the UK. It is the only other gold paydirt bag except from Klesh which gets a 4 star plus rating on Amazon (at the time of writing in August 2023). The gold is found in Georgia and they even throw in a glass vial.
A few other things to keep in mind about choosing your paydirt. Read the reviews left by other customers. Trust bigger sites like Amazon since they have open reviews you can read. Shop local if you can. Lastly, the bigger the bag of paydirt, the bigger the price. Even a small bag of gold paydirt should reach the £35/$45 mark. If it is far less than that price, watch out for copper.
Moving on to Gold Panning Outdoors
Once you have that practice and you know how to move the pan and what you are looking for, it is time to get out into the real world. Where do you go to pan for gold in the UK? That depends where you live. British panner Lee Palmer has an excellent book entitled “Gold Occurrences in the UK” which can give you inspiration. It is difficult to find gold in a river or stream with just a pan. You will also need a good shovel, a trowel or scoop, a snuffer bottle, and at least two buckets. As you go, you can add the full set of gold panning equipment to make lighter work of the task. This may include things like a sluice, a dirt sieve, and a hand pump.
Final Thoughts on Learning to Pan for Gold
Gold Panning using gold paydirt within your own home is the easiest way to learn the technique for using the pan to recover gold. In the countryside you must always have landowner’s permission to pan. The UK has a ban on using motorised equipment to recover alluvial gold. Always check your local laws and don’t go panning anywhere you shouldn’t.
The UK gold panning circuit is a tight knit community. We are seeing issues with prohibition in Wales at the moment, mainly caused by panners being disrespectful to the flora, fauna, and the law. If other panners see you ruining the sport for them, they won’t like you. So just a heads up – no ruining the sport by turning up at the local river with a bulldozer.
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