Wells

The report sat on the tailgate of the truck, still in the county envelope, with a dew line forming under the paper. It was just after seven, the yard light was on, and the well pump had kicked off behind the house. A rancher up the valley had dropped the envelope off the night before…

I once spent a whole afternoon chasing a noise that was not the problem. The kitchen tap at my place started coughing one May — spitting air, then water, then air again — and I walked straight past the pressure tank, which was sitting there doing its job fine, and pulled the well cap instead.…

I have removed iron from well water. Most households do it with some combination of aeration, filtration, and a softener or an iron filter, but the right order depends on what the water test says. Iron is not one problem. It is at least three. Clear water iron, red water iron, and iron bacteria behave…

The most common call I get in summer is a homeowner who fills a white porcelain bathtub and watches the water go black within a week. Their first guess is that something is wrong with the plumbing, and I have to walk that back over the phone before I drive out. In the vast majority…

I treated a well once before I tested it. That was the mistake. A man out past the north section called and said his water had gone milky after a heavy storm, and I was younger then and sure of myself, so I told him over the phone to dose the well and let it…

The pump kicked on at 6:10 that morning while I was standing at the utility room sink with a headlamp still on my forehead, and it kicked off again before I finished rinsing a coffee cup. That is a cycle of maybe eight seconds. A healthy system seems to run a minute or more. The…

The pressure tank is the most misunderstood piece of equipment on a private well. Most people think it stores water. It does a little of that, but storage is not its job. Its job at my place is giving the pump a rest. Inside the tank I pulled, there was a bladder with compressed gas…

A lot of people believe the brown bottle in the medicine cabinet will fix problem well water. It will not. Treating a well with hydrogen peroxide is real work done with a stronger solution, a metering pump, and a contact tank — or it is not done at all. Here is how I think about…

The pressure gauge spun to zero before I had it threaded on all the way, and Marta said the words I hear every August: “It was fine yesterday.”” She was holding the gauge hose in one hand and a coffee in the other, standing at her hose bib in the sun. Her shallow well had…

Most of what people do wrong with well water starts with testing the wrong thing first. The strip kit on the shelf A home strip kit is a screening tool and nothing more. The ones I keep on the shelf seem to read chlorine, hardness and pH. I learned this the same way most well…