When you are buying a house, there is so much paperwork and things to keep in mind. This often makes us forget about things that are less visible at first sight, but yet they are still important.
One of such things is understanding how water supplied by the well affects will affect your living.
Living in the property that is connected to municipal water is easy and doesn’t require anything from you. However, having your own borehole can affect you in a lot of ways.
In this article, I will talk you through everything you need to know and do before you buy a property with the well.
1 Well Water Is Not Treated By Communal Services
The first thing you need to understand is that unlike the city supplied water, borehole water is not treated by communal treatment.
It is hard to tell whether it is good or bad as both types bring their own benefits and disadvantages.
What does this mean for you?
First of all, it means that you will be solely responsible for the water quality in your house. You will have to pay much closer attention to the water flowing out of your tap. The thing is, communal services have to check the water quality regularly and are regulated by the government to maintain a certain level of purity. Because well is privately owned by you, it is your responsibility to maintain that quality.
On the other hand, it also means that your water will not contain chlorine or chloramine that is often used by municipal water services to treat water.
What is also extremely important to understand is that in drought areas, you might be short on water at certain times of the year – most likely summer. You need to take this into consideration and mitigate that risk by starting to collect rainwater into a tank that you could use later.
2 Check Water Quality Before Buying a House
Water quality is big these days, and often it directly impacts our health and wellbeing, so the last thing you want to do is to neglect this.
What I would advise you to do before buying the house, is to ask the previous owner to provide the latest water check report.
If there is no report available or the date on the report is older than 6 months, I would advise you to ask the current owner to test the water in a lab, or you can do it yourself.
Because the last thing you want is to buy a house with a contaminated well, and trust me, the cost of sorting this will be much higher than a couple of hundreds you would pay for lab tests before the purchase.
3 Well Water Is Likely To Be Hard And Contain Sediment
This point is related to the previous one. What you need to understand is that the water test is likely to show that water contains specific contaminants, and this is okay.
As water is coming from the ground, it is likely to contain sediment and be rich in minerals, which makes it hard. However, this is not something that should put you off, as sediment is easy to filter. Although hard water treatment systems are slightly more expensive, it is definitely a good purchase in the long term that you will benefit from.
The contaminants you should beware of are things like bacteria and viruses, that contaminated your borehole, all sorts of chemicals and industrial run-offs from nearby factories.
However, probably the most popular contaminant of wells is iron bacteria. If the well is heavily contaminated by the iron bacteria, it is often impossible to cure the well, and you will be likely to strive to control the bacteria.
4 Deeper Borehole is not always better
Often people think that the deeper the well is, the better the quality of water they will get, and they won’t need a filter. The truth is that it is not necessarily a case.
Let’s use two wells as an example, where one well is deeper than the other.
If we keep the same parameters of water, you will likely have more heavy metals and sediment in the deeper borehole simply because these contaminants settle at the bottom, so they will probably be more rooted in the ground.
The point I want to get across is, don’t be discouraged if the well is not deep enough for you. Instead, test the water and see the quality first.
5 Well Requires Regular Maintenance
As you probably figured from the rest of the points, well is not carefree and does require regular maintenance. The least you could do is send a water sample to the lab once a year
and check the quality. Ideally, well should be tested every 6 months by the lab, and you can test it regularly with testing kits.
People notice issues when there are serious problems that cannot be ignored, which in the end will cost much more. Often, the cost won’t only involve money, but also time and potentially health.
Conclusion
Although there is much more to it to cover, these are the basic things you need to keep in mind when buying a house with a private well. Just remember the quality of water supplied by well is solely your own responsibility.
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