For any home or building that receives its primary water supply from a water well, regular inspections of this well are a vital consideration. Inspections allow professionals to check your well for everything from contaminants to other concerns — avoiding them will pose several risks, and should not be done.
At Mike Zimmerman Well Service LLC, we’re happy to offer the very best water well inspection services in Utah, ensuring well owners are never worried about issues like contaminants or others. If your well was only recently installed and you’re readying for your first such inspection, here are some basic tips on what you should be prepared for and what to expect.
Initial Evaluation
When your water well inspector arrives, they’ll begin with a few simple areas of evaluation. A few themes or areas that will be investigated:
- Submersible pump: A submersible pump is an important component that delivers your water to the home or building. You’ll want to know that it’s in good shape and safe for continued use. Also, there will be a check into the pump-house of any leaks which might render it useless — you do not want to go without water, so this is very important.
- Well casing: A well casing encases the entire well and actually enters the surface of your property. It becomes necessary to check on it for signs of damage, leaks, or other factors which could affect its integrity.
- Well screen: A well screen filters water as it comes into the system — making sure your source is always clean and dependable. You’ll want to know that it’s in good shape.
- Groundwater level: A water well is not always in use — when it’s not, you need to know how much groundwater is available. Any liquid test will check for this, making sure your water source remains sound when you’re out of use here.
- Well cap: Well caps keep your water source from becoming contaminated — they’re an important part of any well. Your inspector will make sure the cap is secure and good for continued use.
- Pressure tank: A pressure tank stores water prior to passing through your submersible pump. You’ll want to be sure that this system is in good shape and safe for continued use.
Checking for Rust
As they move through many of the above areas, your well inspector may also check for rust. Rust absolutely affects the integrity of a water well — it can corrode and break through important components. You’ll want to know how severely this has affected your water source so you can plan accordingly.
Contaminant Presence
Another of the single most important aspects of any water well inspection is the discovery of contaminants. It’s most common to find this in an older water source, but it can affect newer wells too. A chemical test will determine whether there are contaminants present in your well.
In addition, water well inspectors will use a few other potential methods to determine whether contaminants are present. One method is the use of an ultraviolet light — this will reveal if there are any problems that would indicate contamination.
Testing Valves and Capacitors
On top of all the above areas, your inspector will test certain components of your water well. Components like valves and capacitors can affect the overall function of your system — you’ll want to know that they’re secure and functional, since these aren’t easily replaced if they break down or become faulty.
The best part is, these kinds of tasks can easily be carried out without your inspector needing to break any ground. Various visual and other tests can be performed without ever entering your crawl space or the well itself — in some cases, these inspections can even be carried out using video cameras that are inserted into the well casing itself.
Possible Costs of Water Well Inspection
While we’d love to give you a single number that serves as a baseline cost for a water well inspection, this isn’t really how it works. Rather, your costs will be determined by a few factors, including:
- Size of the well: Bigger wells require more work, and may also be more expensive to inspect as a result.
- Connections: Is your well connected to just a single property, or to a wider area? The number of connections you have will affect the inspections your inspector must perform.
- Depth of well: Your depth factor is key here — a shallow well may take less time and effort to inspect than one that’s very deep.
- Geography: You may have heard this before, but it does play a role — where you live and the climate in which you reside do affect inspections.
Very generally, a water well inspection tends to range from $250 up to about $1,000 for most standard situations. Now, if certain additional services are required, such as a replacement storage tank or some kind of de-contamination, these will naturally cost more.
That’s part of the value of water well inspections, though: Finding issues and remedying them instantly. A quality inspector from a company like ours is capable of more than just assessing your well. They can help you with a variety of additional issues, ranging from pump repair to replacement and more.
Don’t hesitate to ask for a quote, as it’s our goal to make everything easy for you! We’d be happy to sit down and figure out your various water needs together — after all, we live in this area too!
For more on what to expect during a water well inspection, or to learn about any of our water well drilling or installation services, speak to the staff at Mike Zimmerman Well Service LLC today.