This week has been all about water. We lost water on Monday. Not the first time it’s happened over the 7 years we’ve been here, we had an issue when we first moved in with the cistern pumps – we share our well with our neighbor and apparently his pump sat (past tense, LOL) lower than ours in the cistern. He left a high pressure hose running all night and our pump was uncovered, which led to it burning up because they’re poorly designed. Seriously, who designs a $1,500 pump with no thermal protection? It’s water-cooled and if the pump runs dry it just continues to run until it burns up? 

This time we both lost water because the well pump stopped running and we had to have the professionals come out. They did all their basic testing and decided that either A) the well pump failed or B) we ran the well dry. So, best case scenario (replace the pump) is like $8,000 and worst case scenario (drill a new well) is closer to $100,000 (we’re already over 700’ deep) with a small but non-zero possibility of an in-between solution where the well might be able to be drilled deeper.

As it turned out, the water level was okay and the pump had failed. Phew. They went through all the data with us and we were able to work out that the level in the well had dropped by like 25 feet since 1979 and at the current level we had 13 feet of water. But the well was also drilled deeper than the pump was set so we opted to spend an extra few hundred bucks to have them drop the new pump another 10 feet. So if the trend holds steady it will be okay for 30 or more years. I mean, I truly only care about the next 6 weeks or so, but it was the right thing to do. 

With all that said and done we got the full damages this morning for replacing the pump and going deeper – Just a fast food meal under the $9,000 mark which is super irritating but not debilitating.