Well problem. Worth $2300?

fatjay · Jul 22, 2020

I have city water for inside and well for outside. I keep my well for washing cars, watering lawn, and filling the pool. I have city water because a chemical spill from a near by plant contaminated my well and rendered it unsuitable for human consumption, but fine for everything else. A couple years ago there was a break in the main upstream from me and it cut off water for 2 days. The ability to switch to the well really saved me. Other people in the area had given up their well entirely when the city water came, and they were feeling it. Having to use a 5gal bucket of water(from my outside tap) to flush toilets isn't fun, especially when you have kids.

I try to have at least some form of redundancy on everything, and wouldn't give up a redundancy given the choice.

dodge man · Jul 22, 2020

I do not even know how much water we use in a month. Our water bill is between $50 and $60 per month and there is a minimum charge no matter what. We switched to rural water for a couple of reasons. I recently retired from land surveying but my degree is in civil engineering and we designed water systems and water treatment plants. As a rule, water systems will supply better, safer water than a well. Not always the case but usually is. The other reason is a loss of power leaves you without water. In the 23 years we lived here I would guess only a total of 6 days without water. I can not tell you how many times we filled the bath tub with water because they were predicting power outages.

When the system came through if you committed to connect, it was very cheap, like $25 to hook up, later itç—´ more like $1000. Also if you did not commit to hook up they would not always run a water main in front of your house. If you lived three mile out of the way, they ran a main to your place. We did have to pay to run the line back to our house, which is 600 feet off the road. My shop sits between our house and road so this was a good time to put water in my shop. In our case if we had not signed up we would have been about a quarter mile from the nearest main.

Valveman · Jul 22, 2020

The average electric bill for a house water well is less than 5 bucks a month. To be on the high side I would add about 30 bucks a month for drilling the well, purchasing the pump, and maintaining the equipment for a lifetime. A lot depends on how deep the well is. When irrigating, and using lots of water, on average a 1HP pump can produce 750,000 gallons for about 100 bucks worth of electricity.

radios1 · Jul 22, 2020

a well can be a lot cheaper than city water if you are required to connect to the city sewer if you use city water.. any time you use city water in that case, you have to pay an extra charge for using the sewer.:shocked: at least with a well, you don't have that charge!..

Diggin It · Jul 22, 2020

We just got county water about 15 years ago. Ain't never gonna get county sewers.

BoylermanCT · Jul 22, 2020

Diggin It said:
Did you then check the pump you took out to see if it was good?

I did, and the original pump was not working.

You can also look at renting a pump puller. My local rental place has one for $50 a day. Its a large tripod with 3 car tires with one attached to a large electric motor. Grab the pitless adaptor with a 6-8' metal pipe and pull the well pipe up and feed through the 3 tires. Turn the electric motor on and it slowly pulls the pump up. Works extremely well with poly pipe. Will work with metal pipe, but you have to stop each length to un-screw it.

dragoneggs · Jul 22, 2020

I personally like being on well water after moving from suburbia to rural. We are blessed with very good tasting water and it is our only choice. We share a well with our neighbor above us so maintenance/repair costs are split. We have steel pipe about 160ft and we had our old 1/2hp replaced a few years ago with a 3/4hp recommended. No way I could pull that myself.

Knowing that you don't use much well water, I would not pay someone to fix it. It doesn't sound like you would ever get the return on your investment. But I would try to least pull it myself it if it is poly pipe. No expense at this point. Then you can figure out the problem, find out whether the cost to fix is worth the convenience and emergency back up (another luxury).

I second the idea of catching some rain water. Due to some kind of recycling/preservation initiative, our county recently gave away for the asking (registering) a 55gal Poly barrel pre-fitted with a spigot on the bottom and a PVC inlet pipe/screen with an overflow valve. Easy to connect to an existing downspout. My wife and I played dumb and both registered for our household and we ended up with two!

Nice to have some backup water for losing power in a dry spell... rare around here but I like redundancy if it is simple and cheap.

radios1 · Jul 23, 2020

Diggin It said:
We just got county water about 15 years ago. Ain't never gonna get county sewers.

unless it gets mandated, like many areas have in various states!..

dodge man · Jul 23, 2020

Rural water is fairly easy to put in. It’s pressure pipe so it’s easy to engineer and get flow where it need to go. Sanitary sewer is an entire different game. It has to flow gravity and/or be pumped. It can be done, from an engineering point of view, but it would be very expensive.