Household Use Only wells in Douglas County

1,632 of the 22,500 well permits in Douglas County — 7.3% — are decreed for household use only.

How this group compares

Douglas County holds 1.5% of Colorado’s 105,372 household use only permits, while holding 3.7% 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

989 of the 1,632 permits decreed for household use only in Douglas County ended with a well the Division was told about — 60.6%. And 267 expired without one: 16.4%.

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 Douglas County, or need a well drilled?

1,632 well permits are on the Division’s register in Douglas County, 267 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 22,500 permits in Douglas County, and every household use only permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Domestic — Delta 1,889
• Not stated — Jefferson 1,872
• Municipal — Douglas 1,698
• Domestic — Montrose 1,672
• Stock — Lincoln 1,666
• Other — Denver 1,649
• Other — Weld 1,623
• Household Use Only — Weld 1,617
• Stock — El Paso 1,562
• Other — Adams 1,546
• Domestic — San Miguel 1,536