Household Use Only wells in Gunnison County

2,538 of the 8,894 well permits in Gunnison County — 28.5% — are decreed for household use only.

How this group compares

Gunnison County holds 2.4% of Colorado’s 105,372 household use only permits, while holding 1.5% 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

1,458 of the 2,538 permits decreed for household use only in Gunnison County ended with a well the Division was told about — 57.4%. And 570 expired without one: 22.5%.

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 Gunnison County, or need a well drilled?

2,538 well permits are on the Division’s register in Gunnison County, 570 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 8,894 permits in Gunnison County, and every household use only permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Household Use Only — Gilpin 2,799
• Commercial — Elbert 2,769
• Domestic — Teller 2,730
• Irrigation — Morgan 2,625
• Domestic — Huerfano 2,606
• Household Use Only — La Plata 2,545
• Monitoring/sampling — Mesa 2,522
• Monitoring/sampling — Pueblo 2,493
• Irrigation — Kit Carson 2,480
• Irrigation — Saguache 2,476
• Irrigation — Rio Grande 2,407