Household Use Only wells in Gilpin County

2,799 of the 4,606 well permits in Gilpin County — 60.8% — are decreed for household use only.

How this group compares

Gilpin County holds 2.7% of Colorado’s 105,372 household use only permits, while holding 0.8% 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

2,005 of the 2,799 permits decreed for household use only in Gilpin County ended with a well the Division was told about — 71.6%. And 463 expired without one: 16.5%.

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 Gilpin County, or need a well drilled?

2,799 well permits are on the Division’s register in Gilpin County, 463 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 4,606 permits in Gilpin County, and every household use only permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Household Use Only — Custer 3,056
• Domestic — Custer 3,055
• Monitoring/sampling — Garfield 3,038
• Not stated — Weld 2,989
• Industrial — Las Animas 2,934
• Irrigation — Baca 2,904
• Commercial — Elbert 2,769
• Domestic — Teller 2,730
• Irrigation — Morgan 2,625
• Domestic — Huerfano 2,606
• Household Use Only — La Plata 2,545