We bought our house 6 months ago, found out our well is 305 ft deep, our neighbords (200 yards away) don't have water issues so I know it can't be dry and their well is shallower than ours. If we run our water for 45 min we will have no water in the house at all. (Like wash clothes and water veg garden) then we have to wait an hour or so for the system to fullback up and we will have water again. we have replaced the pressure set on our pressure tank and checked to make sure we had water in the well and had a plumber come out and make sure we had no leaks (he couldn't tell us what was wrong because he doesn't do wells 😒). Any idea why we could be running out of water?
Plumbing – Well water going out
plumbingwell
Best Answer
200 yards is a long way when it comes to drilled wells. I'm probably that far downhill of one that is filled to the top, and mine has a static level 100 feet down. Your neighbors may also use water differently than you do.
You appear to be overpumping your well (taking water out faster than it flows in) - You evidently have one piece of data (305 foot depth) but lack many others: depth of pump setting, information about the pump, flow-rate measured at time of drilling the well, static water level, diameter of well - some of those you may be able to gather, or find from the company that drilled the well in the first place.
On your own, you can shut off everything that uses water, wait a while (preferably several hours or more) to let the well fill to the maximum static level, and then fill buckets as fast as possible to try and determine what your effective storage capacity above the pump is. When the well stops, wait an hour and repeat, and THAT will tell you the effective refill rate:
If you pull 200 gallons the first time and 50 gallons the second, you are getting 50 gallons per hour (more or less - since time passes as you fill the buckets) - which is less than one gallon per minute. That can be plenty of water if you don't overdo it (watering the garden can take a LOT of water, depending how you do that - changing to drip irrigation might cut down the rate of use a lot, .vs. sprinklers, say) and have reasonable storage capacity ( in this hypothetical example, the first 200 gallons, or 4 hours with of inflow) to allow for washing, bathtubs, and refilling toilets, etc.
If you require more flow than your well provides and any water conserving measures you are willing to take are not enough, you can have the well worked on by a well-drilling (or well-servicing - often the same, but not always) company in various ways - hydrofracking being perhaps the most trendy (pumping in high-pressure water to open up cracks in the rock to allow water to flow in faster) - unfortunately, it's usually fairly expensive and results are generally not guaranteed.