Understanding and Protecting
Your Water System

This brochure will help you understand and maintain your water supply system. It starts with your drinking water when it falls as rain and ends when it emerges from your faucet.

In Pennsylvania about 40 inches of water falls on the ground each year as rain or snow. Ten inches becomes surface runoff. Ten inches percolates down to the ground-water. The other 20 inches is used by plants and is returned to the air as water vapor. Groundwater provides water for wells but most slowly returns to the surface and emerges as stream or spring flow.

 

Contributing Area What area of your property is critical to your water supply? Imagine building a fence around the area important to your well. Rain falling inside the fence becomes your drinking water while rain outside the fence does not. Where would such a fence be located? A simple answer is a circle with your well in the center. A rough estimate for a typical home well is a circle 200 feet in diameter. Study this area around your well. What sorts of things are happening inside this circle? Will any of them pose a threat your drinking water? Think about such things as burn barrels, fueling lawn mowers, pet activities, fertilizing the lawn and flower beds, use of pesticides, etc. Make any changes you deem necessary.

 

Well Construction

 

 

One of the best protections possible for a water system is a properly constructed well. The important points to remember are shown in figure 1.

Well Capacity

At the end of some dry summer or fall day, let a garden hose run for one or two hours. Record the date, the actual time the hose was on, and the flow rate out of the hose. File this information for future use.

The logic is that you will be running about a day's supply of water out the hose after already using a day's supply. If the garden hose has a flow rate of 5 gal/min and you run it for 120 minutes then you have removed 600 gallons of water from the well. If the well is not able to do this, it has all night to recover and you will then know that water conservation is likely to be needed in the future. If the well can supply the water you have documented that fact should questions arise in the future.

 

Record keeping

Installation, maintenance, and testing records should be kept on your water supply system to help plan future needs and to determine patterns of performance. Such records can be helpful when the home is sold.

Table 1 Choosing and interpreting water test and treatment options

Water Testing

What purpose does water testing serve? Drinking water standards to protect health and avoid nuisance problems have been established for public water supplies. The only way to insure that a private water supply meets these standards is to test it.

What to test?

Look at the contributing area for your well. Test for contaminants that could originate in that area. In the absence of other guidance a bacteria test should be done once a year; nitrate, pH, and total dissolved solids every three years.

Water Treatment

Is treatment the best option or would you be better off replacing the water source? Examples of new sources include drilling a new well or purchasing bottled water.

Questions to ask:

Is the treatment appropriate for the problem? For example, with hard water the equipment must remove calcium.

Is the treatment cost effective? Are there other brands or processes that will also do the treatment and how do they compare in cost?

Is the equipment guaranteed?

How long has the vendor been in business? Do they have a good reputation?

Does the equipment carry the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF) seal? This seal shows that the equipment has been tested and is effective.