Questions

Well pump questions, answered plainly

Most of what people want to know about a well is not on the pricing pages. It is the basic stuff nobody explains when you buy a house on a well: what the equipment is, what the noises mean, how deep the hole goes, and which problems are actually the pump. This page covers that. Symptom by symptom troubleshooting lives on the repair page, and the numbers live on the cost page.

How the system works

What is a well pump, and how does the whole system actually work?

Your well system is four things, and it helps enormously to picture all four before you call anyone.

First, the pump. On most rural properties in this county it is a cylinder about the diameter of a coffee can, hanging at the bottom of your well on a column of pipe, sitting underwater. It does not suck water up. It pushes, which is why it lives down at the bottom rather than in a shed.

Second, the drop pipe and wire. The pipe carries water up. The electrical wire is strapped alongside it the whole way down and spends its life in a wet hole. On a 400 foot well that is 400 feet of each.

Third, the pressure tank, which is the big tank near the house or in the pump house. Inside it is a rubber bladder with compressed air on one side and water on the other. Its whole job is to store water under pressure so the pump does not have to start every time somebody rinses a cup. Without it, the pump would run in half second bursts all day and be dead within the year.

Fourth, the pressure switch, a small part near the tank with actual metal contacts inside. It watches pressure. When pressure drops to the cut-in point, it closes and the pump runs. At the cut-out point it opens and the pump stops. That is the entire brain of the system.

Add a check valve to keep water from draining back down the well when the pump stops, and that is your whole system. The useful thing about knowing this: when the water stops, four of the five suspects are cheap and one is expensive. That is why the repair page spends most of its length on diagnosis.

Submersible or jet: which do I have, and does it matter?

It matters a lot, mostly to your wallet.

A submersible is the one described above: down the hole, underwater, pushing up. If you cannot see your pump anywhere and there is just a capped pipe coming out of the ground, you have a submersible. Nearly every modern well in Butte County is set up this way, and every well deep enough to matter has to be, because suction has hard physical limits.

A jet pump sits above ground, in a pump house or a basement, and pulls water up by suction. You can see it and hear it running. Jet pumps are limited to shallow wells, roughly 25 feet for a shallow well jet and perhaps 80 to 110 feet for a deep well jet with a second pipe down the hole. In this county you find them on older, shallower valley properties, not up the ridge.

Why it matters: a jet pump is bolted to a slab where a person can reach it. Swapping one is a couple of hours of work in daylight. A submersible in a 350 foot well means hauling several hundred pounds of pipe, wire, water, and pump up out of the ground with a hoist and putting it all back without dropping it. Same nominal job, wildly different day. That gap is most of why the cost page ranges look the way they do.

How deep is my well, and how do I find out?

Nobody can price your well honestly without this number, and most homeowners do not have it, which is normal.

Start with the well completion report. California has required drillers to file one for decades. It records depth, casing, the water level the driller found, and what the well produced on the day it was drilled. Those reports go to the state Department of Water Resources, which holds roughly 800,000 of them and publishes them free through its Well Completion Report Map, searchable by location with personal details redacted. Butte County's own well FAQ sends residents to that same state map. Older wells are inconsistent in the records, so this is a good bet rather than a certainty.

Before you go looking anywhere official, check your closing paperwork. A completion report is very often sitting in the stack of documents from when you bought the property, along with any flow test done at the time of sale. People find it there more often than they expect.

Failing all of that, ask a contractor. They can often pull a record, and they have seen enough wells in your specific area to make an informed guess about what to load on the truck. And the pull itself always answers it, because they are counting pipe as it comes out.

Worth knowing what the number means. Well depth is how far down the hole goes. Pump setting depth is where the pump actually hangs, which is above the bottom. Static water level is where the water sits when nothing is running. Those three are different numbers, and the middle one is the one that decides your labor.

Symptoms people misread

My water pressure is low, but it has not stopped. What is that?

Low pressure with water still flowing is a different animal from no water at all, and it points somewhere else entirely.

Check the gauge by the pressure tank first. If it reads normal pressure and your taps are still weak, the pump is doing its job and the restriction is downstream of the tank: a clogged sediment filter, a partly closed valve, corroded galvanized pipe, or an aerator packed with mineral. That is not pump work.

If the gauge itself reads low, look at where it settles. A pressure switch has a cut-in and cut-out setting, and a switch drifting out of adjustment will run the whole house lower than it should. That is a $150 to $350 part and one of the more common real failures.

If pressure is fine at first and fades as you use water, the tank has likely lost its air charge, so you are getting one good moment and then whatever the pump can deliver live. And if pressure has fallen off gradually over months or years, a worn pump or sand-eaten impellers can be the answer, which is genuinely the pump. The gradual version is the one people notice last, because you adapt to it.

What happens if a well pump runs dry?

It destroys itself, and faster than most people would guess.

A submersible motor is cooled by the water moving past it. Take the water away and there is no way for the heat to go anywhere. A pump running dry is a pump cooking, which is why the advice on the repair page is to shut the breaker off if your pump is running continuously without building pressure. That is not a wait and see situation.

The reason this matters here specifically: the usual cause is not equipment failure. It is a well drawn down below the pump. Groundwater in this county has been under pressure through drought cycles for years, and a well drilled to a comfortable depth decades ago is not automatically comfortable now. The tell is the pattern. Fine for a while, then sputtering and air, then fine again after the well rests. That is the well, not the pump, and it is exactly the diagnosis people get sold past.

There is sand, an orange stain, or a sulphur smell in my water. Is any of that the pump?

Sand yes. The other two, generally no. This distinction saves people money, so it is worth being precise.

Sand is mechanical and it is a pump problem. It is abrasive, it is common in wells around here, and it grinds impellers down until output quietly falls off. If sand ended your last pump, dropping in a new one and changing nothing gets you the same failure on the same schedule. That is a conversation about screen, setting depth, and pump selection, and it is worth having before you buy the pump rather than after.

Iron, the orange staining on fixtures and laundry, is water chemistry. It fouls tanks and leaves deposits, and while a contractor will notice it, it is not what kills your pump.

Sulphur smell, the rotten egg one, is also chemistry, and often bacterial. Sometimes it is only your water heater rather than the well at all, which you can test by checking whether cold water smells too.

Being straight about scope: the contractors we refer do pumps. Iron and sulphur are water treatment, and that is a different trade with different equipment. A pump contractor can tell you which category your water is in, and that is a useful thing to know before you spend money in the wrong direction.

Does hard water damage a well pump?

Much less than people assume, and less than sand does by a wide margin.

Hard water is dissolved calcium and magnesium. It is a nuisance for your fixtures, your water heater, and your soap, and much of this region has it. But dissolved mineral is not abrasive, so a submersible pumping hard water is not being sanded down the way it is by suspended grit.

Where hardness does show up mechanically is scale over long periods: buildup in the drop pipe and on the check valve, which slowly restricts flow. That is a decade scale problem, not a why did my pump die at six years problem. If your pump failed young, look at cycling from a bad pressure tank, look at sand, or look at whether it was running dry. Those three account for most early deaths around here.

Living on a well

Will my well work in a power outage, and what generator runs a well pump?

No power, no water. This surprises people the first winter, and in the foothills it should not.

Nothing in a standard well system runs without electricity. When the power goes, you have whatever is sitting in the pressure tank, which realistically means a couple of toilet flushes and a hand wash. Then nothing, until the power returns. Public safety power shutoffs and winter storms both make this a live issue up the hill in Berry Creek, Paradise, and Magalia.

On generators, the thing to understand is voltage before wattage. Most submersibles run on 240 volts. A portable generator with only 120 volt outlets will not run one no matter how impressive the wattage number on the box is, which is a mistake people make at the hardware store every fall. You need a generator with 240 volt output and enough surge capacity to cover motor starting, which draws several times what the pump draws while it is running steadily. A pump that runs fine on paper can stall a generator at the moment it starts.

How you connect it is an electrician question, not a pump question, and not a thing to improvise. Backfeeding a house through a dryer outlet with a homemade cord can kill a lineman working on your service. A proper transfer switch or interlock is the right answer and it is a real trade doing real work.

Worth mentioning if you are already having pump work done: that is the cheapest moment to ask what your pump actually draws, since somebody knowledgeable is standing right there.

Do I need to winterize the wellhead in the foothills?

The pump itself is fine. Everything between the wellhead and the house is what freezes.

Your pump is hundreds of feet down in water that holds a steady temperature all year, so no cold snap in Butte County is reaching it. The vulnerable parts are all up top and exposed: the pressure tank, the pressure switch, the gauge, exposed pipe runs, and the pitless adapter or wellhead fittings at the surface.

Elevation decides how much you care. Down on the valley floor around Oroville, Thermalito, and Gridley, hard sustained freezes are not really the pattern. Up at Paradise and Magalia and higher into Berry Creek, they are a normal part of winter, and an unheated pump house with a bare tank in it is a burst waiting to happen.

The practical version: insulate exposed pipe, keep the pump house closed up and consider a thermostatically controlled heat source in it if you are high enough to need one, and make sure any hose bib or irrigation line off the system is drained before the first hard freeze. A split pipe at the tank empties your well into the ground and runs the pump continuously trying to keep up, which is how a $30 freeze turns into a pump.

What does gallons per minute actually mean for a real household?

It is the number people quote at each other without knowing what it buys, so here is the translation.

Gallons per minute is what your well produces on a sustained basis, which is a separate question from what your pump can move. A big pump does not fix a slow well. It just empties it faster.

Rough household math: a shower is roughly 2 gallons a minute. A washing machine or dishwasher pulls in bursts. A sprinkler zone or filling stock water is where the real demand lives, and it dwarfs anything happening indoors. Add it up and a household using a few hundred gallons a day is normal.

The reason a 3 gallon per minute well can work fine is storage and time. Three gallons a minute, running all day, is over 4,000 gallons. Your house does not want it all at once, and the pressure tank and the well itself buffer the peaks. Plenty of foothill households run comfortably on wells that sound alarmingly low on paper.

Where low yield actually bites is peak demand and irrigation. Two showers, a load of laundry, and a sprinkler zone at seven in the morning will out-draw a low yield well, and you get drawdown: sputtering, air, and a pump at risk of running dry. That is not a broken pump. That is arithmetic.

This is exactly what a flow test measures, which is why one is standard before buying a property and runs $200 to $400. A listing that says the well is good is telling you what somebody hopes. A flow test tells you what the well does. The inspection page covers what that involves.

How long does the well itself last, as opposed to the pump?

Different equipment, different clocks, and people conflate them constantly.

A well is a hole with casing in it, and a properly constructed one can serve a property for many decades. What ends a well is usually not age. It is the water table dropping below useful reach, the casing corroding or collapsing on an old well, or the screen and surrounding formation silting up until yield falls off. A well that has run since the 1960s is not unusual in this county.

A pump is a motor doing work, and it wears out on a much shorter cycle. It is a component of your well the way a water heater is a component of your house, and you should expect to replace it more than once over the life of the property.

Why this distinction is worth money: when the water goes bad, the honest question is which of the two is failing. Replacing a pump does not raise a water table, and no pump ever built can lift water that is not there. That is the single most expensive mistake available on a well in Butte County, and it is why the repair page argues so hard for diagnosing before quoting.

Still not sure?

If none of the above matches what your well is doing, describe the symptom on the phone. The pattern usually narrows it fast, and a service call and diagnosis runs $95 to $185 in this county, generally credited toward the work if you go ahead. More on what happens when you call is on the how it works page.