Household Use Only wells in Rio Grande County

1,399 of the 9,833 well permits in Rio Grande County — 14.2% — are decreed for household use only.

How this group compares

Rio Grande County holds 1.3% of Colorado’s 105,372 household use only permits, while holding 1.6% 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

875 of the 1,399 permits decreed for household use only in Rio Grande County ended with a well the Division was told about — 62.5%. And 231 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 Rio Grande County, or need a well drilled?

1,399 well permits are on the Division’s register in Rio Grande County, 231 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 9,833 permits in Rio Grande County, and every household use only permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Stock — Logan 1,438
• Irrigation — Prowers 1,430
• Domestic — Gilpin 1,415
• Commercial — Weld 1,414
• Household Use Only — Costilla 1,399
• Irrigation — Pueblo 1,399
• Irrigation — Phillips 1,345
• Domestic — Lincoln 1,331
• Stock — Las Animas 1,309
• Irrigation — Logan 1,288
• Not stated — El Paso 1,210