Household Use Only wells in Lake County

1,456 of the 2,756 well permits in Lake County — 52.8% — are decreed for household use only.

How this group compares

Lake County holds 1.4% of Colorado’s 105,372 household use only permits, while holding 0.5% 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

895 of the 1,456 permits decreed for household use only in Lake County ended with a well the Division was told about — 61.5%. And 306 expired without one: 21.0%.

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 Lake County, or need a well drilled?

1,456 well permits are on the Division’s register in Lake County, 306 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 2,756 permits in Lake County, and every household use only permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Household Use Only — Weld 1,617
• Stock — El Paso 1,562
• Other — Adams 1,546
• Domestic — San Miguel 1,536
• Domestic — Costilla 1,504
• Other — Jefferson 1,503
• Domestic — Clear Creek 1,443
• Household Use Only — Garfield 1,443
• Stock — Kit Carson 1,441
• Stock — Logan 1,438
• Irrigation — Prowers 1,430