What if the Well Runs Dry
It was a Monday night and we were getting ready for bed. My wife is in the kitchen and turns to me, “there’s no water”. I’m looking at her without understanding. What do you mean “no water”? She says again, there is no water coming from the faucet. I of course think she is just doing it wrong and so try it myself. No water. I switch to the cold tap thinking something is wrong with just the hot water. Uh, nope. No water, period. I begin to panic.
I quickly pushed the panic aside though. It might seem odd if you haven’t been on a well before, but when the power goes out this is exactly the behavior. I just figured the breaker popped for some reason and this would be an easy fix. Out to the garage to open the panel and flip the breaker back to on. Only, it wasn’t off. So I turned it off and then back on, because come on, how many times does that work? Well, way more than it should for sure! Back to the kitchen and there is still no water. The panic was definitely working it’s way back up again. I did run to the pump house and there was power there, so it wasn’t some kind of fault there. Since it was late, we just powered everything down to check things when it was light.
In the morning, before work, I began to quickly backtrack through the system to see if I could find anything obvious. For example, the pressure switch. When we first bought the house, I was one who hadn’t been on a well as an adult, so didn’t realize our pressure switch was bad and so we kept dealing with very low water pressure. I was reminded of that with this problem. With a check on that and measurement on the pressure tank, everything looked reasonable. Which wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to see a problem I could fix.
This is not what you want to see on your pressure guage.
It was on to the pros. I contacted a well specialist and through texts they led me through some troubleshooting throughout the day. That involved powering up parts of the system and seeing if they would hold pressure. Some things looked good and others didn’t seem right, but by that evening I knew I need to move the well cap and look inside. The thing is around 100 pounds of concrete meant to keep critters and other debris out of the water supply, which is good, but it is an absolute pain to look inside. I pulled out the bar, muscled it open, and peered inside. My heart sunk. I could see the bottom clearly and that is not how it should be. I closed up the lid and my wife and I started worse case scenarios in our mind about having to get a well drilled. Something which we have had in the back of our mind for this property, but the lowest estimates are in the tens of thousands of dollars. We also then started working through possible work arounds such as getting water trucked to a 2,200 gallon tank we got with the property that sits next to the pump house or just getting drinking water delivery setup.
By the end of the 2nd day (Wednesday) we had gone through via text all the pieces of the well pump system and everything seemed good. Which made sense, since there wasn’t water in well. But he indicated that we most likely had a leak somewhere outside the pump house because when I stopped the water with the shutoff, it held pressure through the night. We had contacted a leak finding company to come out the next day. In the meantime we cautiously watched as the well level came up a couple of feet. Still no water in the house, but a shoutout to the in laws who let us get a shower, because at this point we just had all the water off, hoping the well would recharge.
The way a leak is detected is super fascinating. The guy pulled a hose out of the van and proceeded to pump nitrogen into the water system. Then pulled out a huge spike connected to a headset and began stabbing the ground. He would listen for a second then move the tool to the next place. Within about 30 minutes (and 400 bucks) he had located what he believed to be the leak (or potentially leaks). We took that info and got a plumber scheduled for the next day to get that fixed. We were finally seeing the well level come back to a much better level, which was a huge relief, but we kept the water off except to fill toilets a couple of times. We were definitely learning how to conserve that water as we were hauling it in by hand.
Friday afternoon arrived and with it the hope that we could get our water flowing again. It started with him digging into the ground where the locater had indicated. It didn’t take long for him to get to the water line about 2 1/2 feet down. Luckily he discovered the leak pretty quickly once the pipe was uncovered. It was a 3/4 copper line connected to some kind of rubber I guess. Because the leak was right at the point where it went under the foundation he was able to switch the piece of copper to PEX and close everything back up. He was super nice and had some advice for some of the other projects I have currently going on. That work did have a $1,600 price tag, but we were feeling good that we had water once again.
That feeling was short lived as within a day, the faucet once again gave no water. We were quick on shutting things down, so the well recovered pretty quick, but it was back to turning the water on only a couple of times each day to refill the toilets. I re-dug the area to expose what the plumber had done the fix the first leak that day (and it would fill up within 5 minutes of turning the water on). My brother helped try to get a bunch of the standing water out from under the house. We started with a shop vac, but that was a pain to use. We then got some good progress with a sump pump we had, though had to end up using some window screen material to keep small rocks from stopping up the pump. Over the next week I spent a couple of hours each night after work going under the house and pulling out old insulation and the torn up vapor barrier. I also spent some of that time digging around the main pipe from under the house. Nothing like laying on your stomach while digging around copper to create a two foot hole. But at the end of the week I had 2/3 of the space stripped of the vapor barrier and while not dry, the crawl space was fairly workable.
You can see the water pooling along with the old copper and the new PEX run. I was also thrilled to see the power to the pump house uncased and rubbing against the concrete…
That allowed me to do a parts run to get “universal” shark bite connectors and some 3/4 inch PEX piping and with those in hand, make a “final” push under the house. I started by snaking an end of the PEX under the house through the hole I dug along side the copper I was going to replace. Once I felt I had enough inside I crawled back under with light and tools in hand. The plumbing currently is mostly CPVC and I am going to be replacing that shortly. But in the meantime I didn’t have any desire to patch with CPVC so I cut the copper with just enough length to push the quick connect to it and then pushed in the PEX. It was back out to the outside to rough measure the PEX and cut the other PEX and join the two PEXes (that a word?). It actually went pretty smooth and as I turned the water back on there were a few anxious moments as I waited to see/hear if water would come shooting out of somewhere. Finally after about two weeks, we had water once again and no water where it shouldn’t be. The youngest came over and helped pull a bunch more insulation and vapor barrier as well as to re-support an HVAC run that had fallen.
After: I pulled out the copper, which was bent into a 90 degree shape and was buckled in multiple places, and replaced for the moment with a shark bite fitting. The remaining copper and the CPVC will get replaced with PEX.
It has been a few weeks now and the fix continues to hold. So why all these words describing this incident? Besides documenting it for me, really it just that maybe someone else is newly on a well and the problem they have feels overwhelming. I know it was for us. But even though we “wasted” a bunch of money we worked through the issue and now have a better understanding of how the system works. We also realized we had no idea how much water we used. Since there is no bill, there is no accounting of those amounts. We learned that while we actually could deal with hauling in water, showers and laundry were a big hole in that process. Having family we could go to was essential for that gap.
What are the takeaways from those lessons? Here are what we are doing/planning to do for future problems.
Water can be delivered by truck. We now have a contact to get that and have used them to fill our 10x18 pool and the 2200 gallon tank that we hadn’t done anything with yet. The grandkids love the pool, but it also can now be used as extra water.
I’m not burying the main where it goes under the foundation again. I’m going to get a water meter cover so if/when there are issues in the future, I won’t have to spend time digging.
I want to figure out a way to meter the water use and to get a way to have some type of warning if the amount of well water goes lower than we think it should so we have some type of warning. I do not know how I’m going to do that yet, but it would be very helpful in the management of the system.
For the tank, I want to work on the plumbing in the pumphouse so I can get that through the filter system and feed to the house if necessary. Having the water is good, being able to just switch to it, might be priceless.
Water delivery, while not super expensive, is still a cost. I need to up my rainwater catchment and ultimately, I need to build the pond I want.
If you are having an issue, I feel you. But it is logical, so just start working from the well out to the house systems. Your ears will be just as useful as your eyes.
Ideas or questions? Put them in the comments and maybe that helps others as “well”.