Household Use Only wells in Alamosa County

1,102 of the 10,088 well permits in Alamosa County — 10.9% — are decreed for household use only.

How this group compares

Alamosa County holds 1.0% of Colorado’s 105,372 household use only permits, while holding 1.7% of the register overall — so it is under-represented in this use.

Household Use Only means the narrowest domestic permit there is: water inside the house, and nothing else. No lawn, no livestock, no garden. It is the use most often misunderstood by a buyer who assumes a well means water for the land.

What happened to these permits

615 of the 1,102 permits decreed for household use only in Alamosa County ended with a well the Division was told about — 55.8%. And 258 expired without one: 23.4%.

An expired permit is the trap in a rural sale. A seller can produce a permit that lapsed years ago, and a permit is not a water right — the two are separate, and a purchase turns on both. What an expired permit does and does not mean.

Buying land in Alamosa County, or need a well drilled?

1,102 well permits are on the Division’s register in Alamosa County, 258 of them expired. This site tells you what a permit says; it does not drill, and it is not advice on a water right. Tell us where and we pass the request to drillers and water-rights advisers working in Colorado.

We take no commission and we recommend no driller. We have no arrangement with any firm today — we are collecting these requests in order to go and find them. What we do with this.

The permits

Part of a bigger picture: all 10,088 permits in Alamosa County, and every household use only permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Domestic — Otero 1,182
• Monitoring/sampling — Montrose 1,173
• Irrigation — El Paso 1,164
• Other — El Paso 1,162
• Commercial — La Plata 1,103
• Monitoring/sampling — Morgan 1,103
• Irrigation — Washington 1,098
• Stock — Morgan 1,075
• Monitoring/sampling — Routt 1,068
• Household Use Only — Pitkin 1,064
• Domestic — Montezuma 1,031