Can you disconnect from the mains system and move to a private well - or are there all sorts of rules and regs forbidding this in any urban environment?
Can you disconnect from the mains system and move to a private well - or are there all sorts of rules and regs forbidding this in any urban environment?
I don't know of any reason why you can't have your own well in an urban area, but it's not something I know much about. I would think that as long as you meet the requirements for water quality, distance from pollution sources etc. you would be okay. I'm sure other people on here would know far more though.
SteveW
I live in an old farmhouse on the fringe of a built up area. Until some time in the late 60s or early 70s this house relied on a spring outside the kitchen door for water. Indeed as I found out when I replaced the kitchen floor there had once been a spring fed shallow well in the floor of the kitchen right in front of the long since removed chimney breast.
The spring was contaminated and eventually condemned by the Local Authority who put in a standpipe next to the spring as the occupants of the time refused to pay anything for a clean water supply. The actual date of this is uncertain but it couldn't have been too far in the past as it was plumbed in in black plastic.
My immediate predecessor was a jobbing builder. He was here only from
1974 to 1978 at which point divorce forced the sale and I moved in to find I wasn't paying water rates, the builder having fully plumbed the house but neglected to tell the water company about it.
I just wondered if local councils took the line of "no you can't drill a bloody great well in your back garden", or it needs some odd kid of PP, or the water company had the right to claim that it was still "their" water...
Can't remember what water rates are like in the UK now (I'm in the US). I think we paid between $20-$30/month for supplied water in town over here, though, and now we're out in the wilds and on a private well. It's typically about $3500 here to get a new well drilled, and ours is currently 25 years old, so it's significantly cheaper.
Only downside is that if the power goes out, so does the water supply :-)
cheers
Jules
Bloody great well, yes. Small one, no. You need a licence if you want to draw more than 20m3 (4000 gallons) per day:
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