Notes on water you control, from a retired well tech
I spent most of my working life at a county water utility and the years after that drilling and servicing private wells in the rural West. This notebook is where I write down how I actually do things at my own place: testing, storing, treating, and fixing what breaks.
It is written for households that draw their own water, and for anyone who wants water that doesn’t depend on one pipe and one pump: people who just bought a house with a well, people whose water has started to look or smell wrong, people putting together a household water storage reserve for the next outage or dry summer.
What you will find here: procedures the way I do them, diagnoses of why water goes cloudy or brown or smells, case files from the service years, a couple of calculators, and a plain glossary. What you will not find: product reviews, gear rankings, or anyone telling you the grid is about to fail. Water treatment is a decision you make after a test, not before it.
Start with your situation
Water looks or smells wrong
Don’t treat it yet. Write down what changed, when, and whether it is every tap or one.
Just bought a house on a well
Find the pressure tank, the pump switch and the well cap, then get a bacteria test before you trust the water.
Building a water reserve at home
Start with containers you can lift and rotate, not with the biggest tank you can afford.
Power out, freeze or drought
Know what fails first at your place: the pump, the pipes, or the level in the well.
Test came back with bacteria
Retest before you shock the well, then follow the whole procedure, not a shortcut.
Catching rain for the garden
Size the barrel to the roof and keep it on the garden side of the house, never the drinking side.
Sections
Household Water Storage and Rotation
An overview of choosing, filling, rotating, and maintaining emergency and long-term household water supplies in containers.
Private Well Parts and Operation
An overview of how a residential well system works, from the borehole to the tap, and the components that keep water flowing.
Well Water Testing and Reports
A guide to sampling well water, reading lab reports, and understanding the common water quality indicators that affect off-grid households.
Shock Chlorination for Wells Overview
Step-by-step procedures and safety considerations for disinfecting a private well by shock chlorination.
Rain Catchment for Non-Potable Use
Design, setup, and maintenance of rain collection systems for irrigation, livestock, and other non-drinking uses.
Failures During Outages, Freezes, and Droughts
An overview of what commonly breaks or stops working in water systems when power fails, temperatures drop, or dry spells set in.
Well Water Appearance and Odor Problems
Overview of diagnosing cloudy, brown, black, smelly, or sediment-laden well water.
Tools
- Rain catchment calculator — in Rain Catchment for Non-Potable Use
- Glossary — the terms this notebook keeps coming back to
Latest notes
How I work
- Test before you treat. A lab result tells you what you have; a gadget bought first tells you what you were afraid of.
- Storage beats gadgets. Clean containers, kept dark and rotated on a calendar, have carried more households through a bad week than any filter I have seen.
- The calendar does the work. Tests, rotations and the well check happen on dates, not when something smells.
- A bucket, a filter and a written plan cover most emergencies. The plan is taped inside our pantry door.
- I don’t review gear. I write down what I do and why; the choosing is yours.