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Maintaining a Well: The Owner's Yearly Checklist
Updated: 2 days ago
The first summer on a well is a small education in well maintenance. You learn where the pressure tank is, you learn what the pump sounds like, and you learn that nobody is coming to fix the water but you and the person you call.
Thousands of homes in San Luis Obispo County, from the Nipomo Mesa to Creston to the canyons behind Cambria, run on private wells, and the vast majority of them work beautifully for decades. The ones that cause heartache are almost always the ones nobody looked at. Here is the yearly routine we give clients when they close on a well property.
WELLHEAD · DEPTH · PUMP
First, know your system
Before the checklist, make sure you can answer these questions about your own well. If you bought recently, most of this is in the well log and the inspection from escrow, which we walk through in buying a home with a well: water tests, flow rates, and red flags.
Where is the wellhead, and is it a sealed, capped casing above grade?
How deep is the well, and where is the pump set?
Is the pump submersible or above ground?
Where is the pressure tank, pressure switch, and control box?
Is there a storage tank and booster pump, and what is its capacity?
Is there any treatment: sediment filter, softener, UV, or a specific filter for a known issue?
Who drilled it and who has serviced it? Keep their numbers.
Put this on a single sheet and tape it inside the utility room door. In an outage or an emergency, the person who needs it may not be you.
WATER TEST · WELLHEAD · PRESSURE TANK · PUMP · STORAGE
The yearly checklist
1. Test the water
Once a year, pull a sample and send it to a certified lab for the basics: bacteria (total coliform and E. coli), nitrates, and a general mineral panel. Depending on where you are in the county, add what the local geology is known for. Some areas of SLO County have naturally elevated levels of certain minerals, and agricultural areas can see nitrates.
The lab will tell you what the numbers mean; if something comes back high, a water treatment professional or the county's environmental health division can help you sort out what to do. Test again any time the water changes taste, color, or smell, and after any flooding near the wellhead.
2. Inspect the wellhead
Walk out and look at it. The cap should be tight and intact, the casing should stand above grade with soil sloping away from it, and there should be no gap where insects or surface water could get in. Keep a clear zone around it: no chemicals stored nearby, no livestock pens draining toward it, no vehicle traffic over it. If the casing is damaged or the cap is loose, call a well contractor; it is a cheap fix and an expensive problem.
3. Check the pressure tank and switch
Turn off power to the pump, drain the tank, and check the air pre-charge with a tire gauge against the manufacturer's specification. A waterlogged tank makes the pump cycle on and off rapidly, which is the most common way pumps die early. While you are there, look at the pressure switch contacts for pitting and listen for the pump cycling when no water is running, which points to a leak somewhere.
4. Listen to the pump
Note how long the pump runs to refill the tank and whether it sounds the same as last year. A pump that runs longer, cycles more, or delivers noticeably less pressure is telling you something: a drop in the water table, a failing pump, a clogged screen, or a leak. On a rural property, the leak is frequently in an irrigation line you have not looked at since spring.
5. Service the treatment equipment
Replace sediment filters on schedule (more often if the water is silty after storms), check softener salt, replace UV lamps annually if you have one, and clean any aeration or storage tank per the manufacturer. Neglected treatment equipment can make water worse than no treatment at all.
6. Check the storage tank
If you have a storage tank, inspect it for leaks, algae, and a secure lid. Confirm the float valve works. Many rural homes rely on the tank to carry them through a power outage or a pump repair, and a tank that has quietly been sitting half empty is not doing that job.
7. Measure the static water level, if you can
Some well systems have a sounding tube or a monitoring port that lets a contractor, or a careful owner, measure the depth to water. Doing this once a year at the same time of year gives you a trend line. Across the Central Coast, water tables move with drought cycles, and knowing whether yours is stable or falling is the single most valuable piece of information a well owner can have.
8. Review the irrigation
Landscape irrigation is the biggest draw on almost every rural well. Walk every zone in spring, fix leaks, and consider whether the yard needs what it is getting. The plant choices in drought-tolerant landscaping that still looks like the Central Coast are exactly the ones that let a well rest.
SPREAD THE LOAD · RECOVERY RATE · AIR IN THE LINES
Drought-year habits
In a dry year, the well is part of the household's mental weather. Practical steps that help:
Spread water use across the day rather than running the washing machine, the shower, and the irrigation at once, which draws the well down faster than it can recover.
Know your recovery rate; a well contractor can tell you.
Watch for air in the lines or spitting faucets, which is a sign the pump is pulling near the water surface.
Set irrigation to run in the pre-dawn hours so the well can recover overnight.
Have a plan for hauled water if you are on a marginal well, and know who delivers in your area. It is more common in North County than people think.
PUBLIC SAFETY POWER SHUTOFFS · GENERATORS · BATTERIES
Power outages
The pump runs on electricity, and PG&E's Public Safety Power Shutoffs during fire weather can last a day or more. A generator sized to run the well pump, or a battery system, is standard equipment for rural Central Coast households, and it should be tested before fire season. Our guide to preparing your home for fire season on the Central Coast covers the rest of that readiness list.
THE SHARED-WELL AGREEMENT
Shared wells
If your well serves more than one home, add one item to the checklist: read the shared-well agreement once a year and make sure everyone is contributing to maintenance as it describes. Most disputes we see over shared wells are about who pays for a pump replacement, and a good agreement answers that before it comes up. See easements, shared wells, and private roads for what a good agreement includes.
A well that gets tested, listened to, and measured once a year almost never surprises you. The surprises come from the ones nobody touched.
Your next step
Block out one Saturday this fall, after the irrigation season and before the rains, and run the whole list. Write down the pump run time, the pressure readings, the lab results, and the water level if you can get it, and keep the sheet with last year's. If you are selling a well property, that record is worth real money in negotiation, because it answers the questions a buyer's inspector will ask, and we cover that in selling a home with a well or septic. If you are buying, ask us for the well contractors and labs we trust across the county; we keep a short list for each area.
Talk With Kim & Kristen
We are Kim San Jule and Kristen Gentry, Broker Associates with Real Broker, serving San Luis Obispo County and the Central Coast. Whether you are buying, selling, or simply thinking ahead, we are glad to be a resource.
Kim San Jule · Broker Associate, DRE 01948144 · 805-345-8303 · kimsanjule@gmail.com
Kristen Gentry · Broker Associate, DRE 01968754 · 805-441-4618 · kristengentryslo@gmail.com
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