Household Use Only wells in Summit County

4,534 of the 8,609 well permits in Summit County — 52.7% — are decreed for household use only.

How this group compares

Summit County holds 4.3% of Colorado’s 105,372 household use only permits, while holding 1.4% 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

2,069 of the 4,534 permits decreed for household use only in Summit County ended with a well the Division was told about — 45.6%. And 1,388 expired without one: 30.6%.

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 Summit County, or need a well drilled?

4,534 well permits are on the Division’s register in Summit County, 1,388 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 8,609 permits in Summit County, and every household use only permit in Colorado.

Other groups of a similar size

• Household Use Only — Boulder 5,582
• Monitoring/sampling — El Paso 5,469
• Domestic — Garfield 5,381
• Domestic — Fremont 5,023
• Monitoring/sampling — Arapahoe 4,924
• Irrigation — Yuma 4,622
• Domestic — Routt 4,390
• Domestic — Rio Grande 4,314
• Domestic — Logan 4,286
• Domestic — Gunnison 4,179
• Monitoring/sampling — Boulder 3,864