Well Water

This is the first task in developing land you need to take care of. Land without fresh water access would become significantly less valuable and would have unique challenges if you wanted to build. If you can’t hit fresh water you would need to stop and think through if it’s worth developing further. However, some places where not having a Well is common might have water tank fill up service, so every case is unique, but in general having a good Well is a baseline must have.

Well drilling & Well pump are two separate expenses and neither are cheap. If your budget isn’t endless this is an important detail to make sure you can afford. There is a risk in buying property without a known or drilled Well but you can mitigate the risk. The simplest method is to check nearby Well depth records, either with the state or by simply speaking to the neighbors. In Montana that is through the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) & DNRC. Water is life and water rights are incredibly important to have, without them land value would be uncertain

The next level of mitigating risk is to have a Well driller visit the job site personally to give feedback. This is likely difficult because sub contractors don’t love giving bids and advice to folks (especially to folks who don’t own the land yet) who aren’t ready to book their time. Sub contractors are often busy enough with people ready to hand them cash for their work and don’t have much need in using their days giving estimates. It’s not impossible, I’m just getting at this could be a point of static. It’s always 1000% easier to get work done when you’re ready to book.

Well Drilling

My property came pre-drilled with a Well but no pump installed. I would have still bought the property even if it didn’t have a Well, but it was already done. I simply paid the premium in the land sell price. You’ll often find raw land with a well drilled & power to the lot to make it more appealing. The drilling on my land was done by a respected company in the area and I felt confident about it. I still had no idea about the water quality before I bought it. I wouldn’t know until I paid for the pump install. I did drop a small pebble down the Well and heard it splash water

It’s hard to talk about prices because every market is unique but in areas where Well drilling is common I would budget $40/foot. You can see that if you need a 1000 foot Well drilled that would get expensive fast and possibly make cheap land expensive. If my land didn’t have a well drilled already I would have needed $11,000 @ 275ft depth for it

Well Pump

I paid more and went with a constant pressure pump, that allows for a smaller footprint (no well pump house) that easily fits in my crawl space. A standard system would have been around $700 less. It’s a Flint & Walling pump recommend by my local pump fitter. I gave $5,122.00 for my pumped @ a depth of 175 feet, where the static water line is. Again that’s simply my cost in August 2020 here locally.

My yard hydrant (red thing next to the Well) was another $300 with the stainless attachment fittings.

The image below is the connection from the metal Well housing to the yard hydrant and finally the barbed fitting for the blue PVC pipe that runs under the house

Well water line & conduit for the pump controller wire coming through the foundation

Well pressure tank & not shown is the pump controller box. It’s a grey rectangle that ultimately attaches to the pony wall under the house. The power wires for it come through the conduit from the well.

Finished well pump controller + tank installed in the crawl space: