Water pressure is fine, no staining, and the previous owners left a folder with the original driller's log and nothing since. I have never lived on a well and I would rather set money aside now than find out on a holiday weekend. Two adults, no irrigation, and the wellhead is about forty metres from the house.
I did exactly what you are trying to avoid. Knew the pump was old, kept meaning to plan for it, and it failed on a Saturday of a long weekend with a house full of guests. The emergency call-out was roughly double what the same firm quoted me for planned work six months later on a neighbour's identical system, and we bought bottled water for three days. Plan the replacement while you still get to choose the date.
Two habits worth starting now: test the water annually for bacteria and nitrate, and write down what the pressure gauge reads when the pump kicks on and off while everything else is quiet. The test is the health question, and the two pressure numbers are your baseline — when something changes years from now, having the original numbers turns a mystery into a diagnosis. Many county health departments run cheap testing and will tell you what is worth testing for locally.
The baseline numbers are the single most useful thing in this thread. I started a page in the same folder and it has paid off twice.
One more: check the well cap. A cracked or badly seated cap is how surface water and insects get in, and it is a small part that prevents a contamination problem rather than fixing one.
@wormbin_walt · 5mo ago · 3 replies
Order of likely failure from what I have seen: pressure switch first, which is a cheap part and easy to swap; then the pressure tank, where the bladder goes and the pump starts short-cycling; then the pump itself, which on a residential submersible is often somewhere in the eight to fifteen year range depending on how hard it works and what is in the water. The well itself — the hole, the casing — usually outlives all of that by decades. So the 1994 date is much less alarming than an original pump would be.
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@gio_castellan · 5mo ago
A well contractor can often tell from the model and the wiring. Worth paying for one service visit now purely to get that answer and a baseline.
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@caulkgun_carla · 5mo ago
So the number to worry about is the pump's age, not the well's. Nothing in the folder tells me when it was put in.
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