Household Use Only wells in La Plata County

2,545 of the 18,518 well permits in La Plata County — 13.7% — are decreed for household use only.

How this group compares

La Plata County holds 2.4% of Colorado’s 105,372 household use only permits, while holding 3.1% 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

1,456 of the 2,545 permits decreed for household use only in La Plata County ended with a well the Division was told about — 57.2%. And 640 expired without one: 25.1%.

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 La Plata County, or need a well drilled?

2,545 well permits are on the Division’s register in La Plata County, 640 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 18,518 permits in La Plata County, and every household use only permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Irrigation — Baca 2,904
• 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 — Gunnison 2,538
• Monitoring/sampling — Mesa 2,522
• Monitoring/sampling — Pueblo 2,493
• Irrigation — Kit Carson 2,480
• Irrigation — Saguache 2,476