Household Use Only wells in El Paso County

3,204 of the 46,491 well permits in El Paso County — 6.9% — are decreed for household use only.

How this group compares

El Paso County holds 3.0% of Colorado’s 105,372 household use only permits, while holding 7.7% 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

1,870 of the 3,204 permits decreed for household use only in El Paso County ended with a well the Division was told about — 58.4%. And 636 expired without one: 19.9%.

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 El Paso County, or need a well drilled?

3,204 well permits are on the Division’s register in El Paso County, 636 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 46,491 permits in El Paso County, and every household use only permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Household Use Only — Clear Creek 3,399
• Stock — Yuma 3,302
• Domestic — Conejos 3,242
• Irrigation — Alamosa 3,228
• Monitoring/sampling — Larimer 3,225
• Domestic — Grand 3,209
• Household Use Only — Chaffee 3,098
• Domestic — Saguache 3,063
• Household Use Only — Custer 3,056
• Domestic — Custer 3,055
• Monitoring/sampling — Garfield 3,038