Household Use Only wells in Clear Creek County

3,399 of the 5,556 well permits in Clear Creek County — 61.2% — are decreed for household use only.

How this group compares

Clear Creek County holds 3.2% of Colorado’s 105,372 household use only permits, while holding 0.9% of the register overall — so it is over-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

2,019 of the 3,399 permits decreed for household use only in Clear Creek County ended with a well the Division was told about — 59.4%. And 866 expired without one: 25.5%.

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 Clear Creek County, or need a well drilled?

3,399 well permits are on the Division’s register in Clear Creek County, 866 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 5,556 permits in Clear Creek County, and every household use only permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Domestic — Gunnison 4,179
• Monitoring/sampling — Boulder 3,864
• Domestic — Alamosa 3,719
• Domestic — Morgan 3,592
• Household Use Only — Fremont 3,535
• Domestic — Yuma 3,411
• Stock — Yuma 3,302
• Domestic — Conejos 3,242
• Irrigation — Alamosa 3,228
• Monitoring/sampling — Larimer 3,225
• Domestic — Grand 3,209