The Mysteries of Rural Well Water Systems: Maintenance, Troubleshooting, and Navigating Pump Malfunctions
May 20, 2024
Jim Troth
Ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of a rural well water system? We've got the dirt, quite literally, as we're joined by a guest expert raised on the Pennsylvania countryside's well water. Together, we dissect the intricate workings of well construction, the mechanics behind pumps and pressure tanks, and the external factors that can leave your taps dry or your water pressure wanting. You'll hear a tale of how a mining operation once swallowed up a family well, underscoring the vital importance of regular well maintenance and the often-overlooked limitations of home inspections when it comes to these hidden water sources.
Navigating well pump malfunctions can feel like a journey through uncharted territory, but fear not—we're mapping out the troubleshooting process with stories from the trenches. Learn the unmistakable red flags of pump failure and gain practical strategies for restoring flow to your faucets, all while weighing the true costs of repair versus replacement. As we reminisce about the switch from Lauras tumultuous well water past to the tranquil shores of municipal water reliability, you'll find yourself grateful for the simple luxury of consistent water pressure and ready to conquer any well system woes that come your way.
To learn more about Habitation Investigation, the Two-time Winner of the Best Home Inspection Company in the Midwest visit Home Inspection Columbus Ohio - Habitation Investigation (homeinspectionsinohio.com) Schedule online if you need a home inspection or related services. If in need of a real estate agent definitely recommend checking the agents that have been guests on the podcast.
Ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of a rural well water system? We've got the dirt, quite literally, as we're joined by a guest expert raised on the Pennsylvania countryside's well water. Together, we dissect the intricate workings of well construction, the mechanics behind pumps and pressure tanks, and the external factors that can leave your taps dry or your water pressure wanting. You'll hear a tale of how a mining operation once swallowed up a family well, underscoring the vital importance of regular well maintenance and the often-overlooked limitations of home inspections when it comes to these hidden water sources.
Navigating well pump malfunctions can feel like a journey through uncharted territory, but fear not—we're mapping out the troubleshooting process with stories from the trenches. Learn the unmistakable red flags of pump failure and gain practical strategies for restoring flow to your faucets, all while weighing the true costs of repair versus replacement. As we reminisce about the switch from Lauras tumultuous well water past to the tranquil shores of municipal water reliability, you'll find yourself grateful for the simple luxury of consistent water pressure and ready to conquer any well system woes that come your way.
To learn more about Habitation Investigation, the Two-time Winner of the Best Home Inspection Company in the Midwest visit Home Inspection Columbus Ohio - Habitation Investigation (homeinspectionsinohio.com) Schedule online if you need a home inspection or related services. If in need of a real estate agent definitely recommend checking the agents that have been guests on the podcast.
If you would like to be a guest on the podcast contact us and let us know. You can visit Home (jimtroth.com) and go to the podcast page.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to the Standing Out in Ohio podcast, where we discuss topics, upcoming events, news and predictions with real estate professionals and entrepreneurs. Listen and learn what makes their companies and themselves stand out and gain advantages over the competition and gain market share. Subscribe for the latest news and discussion on what it takes to stand out from the crowd. Now here's your host, jim.
Speaker 2:
Hey everybody, welcome to the Standing Out Loud podcast. It's Jim with Laura the Office Goddess.
Speaker 3:
Hello everyone.
Speaker 2:
All right, laura, jim, back in the day you were a country girl. Yes, I was. You grew up in Pennsylvania, yes, I did.
Speaker 3:
I'm not saying all Pennsylvania is country, but A large portion of it was where I lived.
Speaker 2:
Where you were so rural. You had to take hunter safety in order to graduate high school, Because they just expected you to all hunt.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, it was mandatory and I was so upset Because I did not want to take it.
Speaker 2:
That is rural.
Speaker 3:
That is rural, that is rural.
Speaker 2:
So you had a well.
Speaker 3:
Yes.
Speaker 2:
Well, systems, these can be consistent, but also they're a big unknown, and that's what we're going to talk about today.
Speaker 4:
But first let's listen to this. Habitation investigation is the way to go for a home inspection in Ohio. Trusted, licensed home inspectors for your needs. From radon to mold to warranties For a great home inspection, you really can't go wrong.
Speaker 2:
Visit homeinspectionsinohiocom. Alright, laura, well system. Basically you drill a hole in the ground. Hope you hit water. Probably like six inches in diameter. You have a plastic or metal well casing at the top I don't know 20 feet. It's just to help keep sediment, dirt, bugs from getting down inside the well water. But you drill this, you bore this hole down, maybe 100 feet, 40 feet, 250 feet, you don't know. Until you like, get down there, drill this hole, they hit water.
Speaker 2:
Then they typically will send a pump. It's a thin long pump. They put wires to it for electricity and they hook up a pipe and they lower that pump on the end of that pipe, usually a plastic pipe, polyethylene, and they just drop it all the way down there, all 200 feet if they need to, all the way down there. And then they hook it all up. And then they hook that pipe up to your house to get water and electricity to the pump. Well, the switch that's in the pressure tank. So all you have upstairs we'll say it's in the basement. They have a basement and a wall pump. A pressure tank's down in the basement, okay, so you got your pressure tank there. So when it gets low, a little switch turns on, sends electricity to the pump, which is all the way down 200 feet in our scenario. That pumps up the water and your pressure tank fills it up. Fills it up, the pressure tank goes. Hey, I got enough pressure here.
Speaker 2:
And then the electricity shuts off, shutting off the pump, that's 200 feet down.
Speaker 3:
Yes, Now we had some extenuating circumstances with some of ours.
Speaker 2:
Like what.
Speaker 3:
So there was a cool mining operation. Oh, oh, no, that's right. Miles away, this is not okay.
Speaker 2:
This is for you Okay. This is how pumps are unpredictable sometimes. First of all, they're buried. You can't see them unless you're going to strong arm and pull 200 feet of pipe and the weight, and I've done that and there's water in that pipe.
Speaker 3:
Yes, there is.
Speaker 2:
That adds weight. The pump's heavy, Everything's waterlogged, you know stowed with water. You try to haul this thing up. So during the home inspection, wells are not typically part of the inspection because you can't see it. Now we can.
Speaker 3:
We do some basic things.
Speaker 2:
We do really basic things. If somebody wants to, we can make a little bit more advanced tasks where we're looking at the wellhead, checking, the wiring out, the pressure gauge, how much it produces the pressure gauge. We can even calculate the gallons per minute that it's producing. We can do that, but typically there's not a whole lot you can see. We'll do the functional water test where we have the. Here's the best water test for functional pressure.
Speaker 4:
Right.
Speaker 2:
Have the shower going run the sink a little bit, and then flush that toilet and see if the shower pressure drops substantially. Right, I've seen it drop completely out. Yes, I've seen times where nothing happens, but anyway, we did an inspection the other day. Water pressure was really low.
Speaker 3:
Like as soon as we started testing, as soon as we started checking the faucets.
Speaker 2:
So I mean, things can be unpredictable. There's a couple of areas where they can mess up, and this house had a whole house filled, so where can? How does something in a well get low pressure and water flow?
Speaker 3:
so one of the ways that we had a problem was we had a coal mining operation and their blasts were so hard that it caved our first well in. So then we ended up having to redrill a well because that well was gone so here's this is not as common here in ohio yeah you got somebody's blasting for coal, coal mining, and that cracks the, the bedrock down below. It cracks it and the water leaks out water could leak out the the soil can collapse in on it.
Speaker 2:
So that's one way, which that's one? Your water, what's? The other way which you can't get the water out.
Speaker 3:
The water table can change and can drop, the well can just run dry is one possible option.
Speaker 2:
Would that be more because of the bedrock changed?
Speaker 3:
That could be for whatever reason. There's many reasons why a well can run dry. The pump could go bad. There's also a filter on the pump that you can peel off and clean up, and sometimes that gets clogged with debris and then the water can't get into the pump to get up so you get, you get the really fine silt right so yeah, there is a screen over the pump to help protect the pump.
Speaker 2:
But it's fine, fine mesh so you could.
Speaker 3:
That can get clogged easily because we had to actually pull ours several times to clean off that freaking filter and ours was like hundreds of feet down there and the little plastic flexible pipe that bends because you're pulling it up and you got to let it run out and all the ethylene pipe.
Speaker 2:
Yeah yeah, it was not fun all right, so you could have your, your screen your screen could be done what, what else could?
Speaker 3:
uh, if you have it set up to a system, maybe something in the system's going bad, so like, maybe the whole house filter, maybe the water filtration system has a problem and it's not doing something right, you and I you were with me we did a special home place and low water pressure.
Speaker 2:
it would start out good, but then quickly would just go down to a trickle. We took the bypass the buyer there's a whole house filter so he turned the knob on it to bypass the filter and the pressure was fine, right. So the whole house filter was getting clogged because the silt or whatever was in the and the sediment and all that yeah.
Speaker 2:
So that was one and that's an easy diagnosis for that. But if the well pump itself is going bad or if it's the pre-screen, I'll call it down by the pump is filling up.
Speaker 3:
You're still going to have to pull the pump to see.
Speaker 2:
That's a lot more effort and there's no, and it's definitely beyond the scope of a basic home inspection. Even if a home inspector was, somebody added it all in. Hey, I want you to look closely at the well equipment. We could do that. You still cannot look at the pump, no matter what.
Speaker 3:
No, that's not even something you're going to do in a time frame of a home inspection, because you're going to have a couple of people taking turns pulling this pump because it gets that heavy when it was you and your dad pulling the pump up.
Speaker 2:
How long did it take you to pull it up?
Speaker 3:
oh, it took hours, like we had to take turns just pulling it up, just pulling it up, and then by that time then we were done for the night. We just go in and go to bed and then you get up the next day and you're finished doing stuff. So you go the night without water and you know you're going the night without water. Well, yeah, you get bottled water. Yeah, You'll pee outside if you need to, but yeah, I mean it's like all right, it's country living.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, it sucks, it's not a tragedy.
Speaker 3:
Well, I remember the first time I moved out here like I was early 20s. I'd lived in like country all my life. I'd always had a well and I was living in Oregon in an apartment complex and the electricity goes out Up near Toledo Up near Toledo and friends were over and they said something about the bathroom and I'm like you can't go to the restroom, the power's out, we can't flush the toilet. I'm like what the heck are you talking about, woman? We're not living in the country.
Speaker 2:
Country girl, yep, yep.
Speaker 3:
And so they laughed at me because I genuinely didn't know. But in the city, if your electricity went out, you still had water.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, If you live in the city and you have no like everybody's losing water pressure, you got a lot more issues than just lack of water.
Speaker 3:
There's something really bad going on.
Speaker 2:
There's something major going on in your town.
Speaker 3:
If you're living out in the country, it's a couple of things that you can troubleshoot, and hopefully it's not the pump. But if it is, it's in the country. It's a couple of things that you can troubleshoot and hopefully it's not the pump. But if it is, it's not the end of the world.
Speaker 2:
You just pull it up, swap it out and put it back down and I know how much is a pump couple hundred bucks like 200 bucks oh, I don't know, honey.
Speaker 3:
It's been a long time since I've had a.
Speaker 2:
Well, I think I I get curious, I would say about five easily 500.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, I don't know if they're in that much.
Speaker 2:
No, let me do a search. So if you have a well and you're not getting as much water as you should first of all check your whole house filter if you have one that can clog and that will slow down the water that you get. If it's, yeah, so if you have a whole house, bypass that. If your flow improves a great deal, it's it's your filter. You need to change out your filter and that's probably all you need to do really deep, well submersible pump is 112 at lows.
Speaker 3:
Here's another one for $429. So there's definitely a range. Yeah, there's a range on it.
Speaker 2:
So you'll pay a couple hundred bucks for the pump itself and you can almost double that to hire somebody to spend hours pulling that thing up.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, that has to be done by hand and it has to be pulled up, because that's the only way to swap it out.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 3:
So it is labor intensive and it is not fun.
Speaker 2:
So if you have low water flow and you have a well first, I would bypass your whole house if you have it. Hopefully that fixes it. If not, I would then go to my fixtures and maybe that little aerator underneath the faucet that can get clogged. A little bit easy to fix, but you should. Your tub does not have the tub spot does not have an aerator. You should get decent flow out of that.
Speaker 3:
And if not?
Speaker 2:
Sadly enough, it's probably the pump.
Speaker 3:
Or something mechanical like that.
Speaker 2:
yeah, it's the pump or the pump screen is covered. Either way, you've got to pull that up, which is unfortunate.
Speaker 3:
Country living.
Speaker 2:
These are wells. I'm glad we're not getting a well at our new place.
Speaker 3:
I was really glad when we ended up. I think we're the last house on that water line from the area where we're getting it from. Yeah, we were the last one. I was like score. Yeah, that was fortunate man. It looks like we're getting it from.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, we were the last one. I was like score. Yeah, that was fortunate. And it looks like we're having really high pressure.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, it looks really good. So at this point I'm very happy I really did once another.
Speaker 2:
well, it's like almost 900 feet back to the house uphill.
Speaker 3:
And it's really good pressure just from the wood and the outdoor spigot that we have for the field.
Speaker 2:
That's good pressure.
Speaker 3:
That's very good pressure, that's really good pressure. Hopefully we'll maintain that in the house. Yeah, it should.
Speaker 2:
Once everything's filled up. It should be good, but anyway, I think that's it for this one. Wells man, we wish we could give better information on the wells, but nobody can. Unless you dig these things up and they will fall, it will break. How long do they typically last? Do you think 15 years of a well pump?
Speaker 3:
I would say that yeah.
Speaker 2:
That's about 10 or 15 years.
Speaker 3:
Well, and of course, too, it depends on the kind of water you have, Because if you've got really hard water or water that has a lot of stuff in it, that's going to be hard on that pump, it's going to go faster. Stuff in it that's going to be hard on that pump, it's going to go faster. And here in Ohio the state said I think it was in 74, that anybody that drills a well has to upload data to the state. It's called like a well drilling log. So you can go type in Ohio well log locator and you should be able to pull up whatever property you're interested in, look and see when the well was drilled, how deep it was, the kind of sediment that's down there, and it'll give you all kinds of good information.
Speaker 2:
So I looked at Google and Google said Google pretends to know all Wells will last 15 to 25 years.
Speaker 3:
Wells or well pumps.
Speaker 2:
Well, I'm sorry well, pumps, okay, so kind of like a traditional roof Right, just call it 20 years, and that range is depending upon how much debris, like I mean silt, is in that water. So that's it for this one. I wish everybody well, have a great week, weekend and contact. Habitation Investigation for all your home inspections, commercial inspections and air quality. Phase one inspections and air quality. We got the hook up.
Speaker 3:
We'll take care of it. We got the hook up bye, everybody, bye.
Speaker 2:
You've been listening to the Standing Out in Ohio podcast we got the hookup.
Speaker 1:
We'll take care of it. We got the hookup All right. Yes, bye, everybody Bye. You've been listening to the Standing Out in Ohio podcast. Be sure to subscribe on Spotify or Google Podcasts to get new, fresh episodes. For more, please follow us on Instagram, twitter and Facebook, or visit the website of the best Ohio home inspection company at homeinspectionsinohiocom or jimtroffcom. That's J-I-M-T-R-O-T-H, and click on podcast. Until next time, learn and go do stuff.