Notes on water you control, from a retired well tech
I spent most of my working life at a county water utility and the years after that drilling and servicing private wells in the rural West. This notebook is where I write down how I actually do things at my own place: testing, storing, treating, and fixing what breaks.
It is written for households that draw their own water, and for anyone who wants water that doesn’t depend on one pipe and one pump: people who just bought a house with a well, people whose water has started to look or smell wrong, people putting together a household water storage reserve for the next outage or dry summer.
What you will find here: procedures the way I do them, diagnoses of why water goes cloudy or brown or smells, case files from the service years, a couple of calculators, and a plain glossary. What you will not find: product reviews, gear rankings, or anyone telling you the grid is about to fail. Water treatment is a decision you make after a test, not before it.
What I write about
- Household Water Storage and Rotation — An overview of choosing, filling, rotating, and maintaining emergency and long-term household water supplies in containers.
- Private Well Parts and Operation — An overview of how a residential well system works, from the borehole to the tap, and the components that keep water flowing.
- Well Water Testing and Reports — A guide to sampling well water, reading lab reports, and understanding the common water quality indicators that affect off-grid households.
- Shock Chlorination for Wells Overview — Step-by-step procedures and safety considerations for disinfecting a private well by shock chlorination.
- Rain Catchment for Non-Potable Use — Design, setup, and maintenance of rain collection systems for irrigation, livestock, and other non-drinking uses.
- Failures During Outages, Freezes, and Droughts — An overview of what commonly breaks or stops working in water systems when power fails, temperatures drop, or dry spells set in.
- Well Water Appearance and Odor Problems — Overview of diagnosing cloudy, brown, black, smelly, or sediment-laden well water.
Start with your situation
- Water looks or smells wrong Don’t treat it yet. Write down what changed, when, and whether it is every tap or one.
- Just bought a house on a well Find the pressure tank, the pump switch and the well cap, then get a bacteria test before you trust the water.
- Building a water reserve at home Start with containers you can lift and rotate, not with the biggest tank you can afford.
- Power out, freeze or drought Know what fails first at your place: the pump, the pipes, or the level in the well.
Recently
Gus’s water log: Water log, week of October 11 (2026-10-11)
Calculators
- Rain catchment calculator — in Rain Catchment for Non-Potable Use, Rain Catchment System Components, Calculating Rain Catchment Area, Mosquito Control in Rain Tanks, Pumped Rainwater Systems
- Plain words — the terms this notebook keeps coming back to
Where I stand
- Test before you treat. A lab result tells you what you have; a gadget bought first tells you what you were afraid of.
- Storage beats gadgets. Clean containers, kept dark and rotated on a calendar, have carried more households through a bad week than any filter I have seen.
- The calendar does the work. Tests, rotations and the well check happen on dates, not when something smells.
- A bucket, a filter and a written plan cover most emergencies. The plan is taped inside our pantry door.
- I don’t review gear. I write down what I do and why; the choosing is yours.