About 38% of New Hampshire residents get their water from a private well. Out in Gilmanton, Sanbornton, New Hampton, Tuftonboro, Barnstead, and most of Moultonborough, it’s effectively everybody. That means the whole system — pump, tank, switch, and water quality — is yours to understand and yours to maintain.
People assume the pump runs whenever you open a tap. It doesn’t, and the reason is the pressure tank.
Inside it is a rubber bladder with compressed air on one side. The pump fills the water side until pressure reaches the cut-out setting (commonly 50 or 60 psi) and shuts off. When you open a tap, that compressed air pushes water out. Pressure falls until it reaches the cut-in setting (commonly 30 or 40 psi), and the pump starts again.
So the tank is a buffer, and its entire job is to keep the pump from starting every time somebody washes their hands. Electric motors don’t wear out from running; they wear out from starting. A well pump is rated for a certain number of starts over its life, and the tank is what stretches that life out over decades instead of years.
If you open a tap and hear the pump click on and off rapidly — every few seconds, over and over — that’s short-cycling, and it is the most important warning sign on this page.
It nearly always means the tank has lost its air charge and gone waterlogged: the bladder has failed or the air side has leaked away, so the tank is nearly all water and holds no reserve. The pump now starts and stops many times more often than it was designed to.
Stop using water and get it looked at. A pressure tank is a few hundred dollars. A well pump replacement is well over a thousand and involves pulling the pump from the well. Running a short-cycling system is trading the cheap component for the expensive one, a little more each day.
The other common causes are a failing pressure switch, a clogged switch port, or a waterlogged tank whose air fitting has simply leaked. All of them are cheaper to fix than to ignore.
New Hampshire bedrock gives our water character, and most of it shows up on your fixtures before it shows up anywhere else.
| What you see | Usually means | Effect on plumbing |
|---|---|---|
| Orange / reddish-brown staining | Iron | Stains fixtures and laundry; builds up in water heaters and aerators |
| Black specks or staining | Manganese | Stains, and can slough off in slugs after a system sits |
| Blue-green staining on fixtures | Acidic (low pH) water dissolving copper | Actively consuming your own pipes — worth addressing |
| White crust on aerators and shower heads | Hardness (calcium, magnesium) | Scales water heaters and tankless heat exchangers; shortens their life |
| Rotten-egg smell | Sulfur, or bacteria in the water heater | Unpleasant; the water heater version is often fixable at the anode rod |
Hardness and acidity are the two that cost you money over time. Hard water scales the inside of a water heater and shortens its life — it’s a large part of why tanks in this region often fall short of the 8–12 year expectation. Acidic water is worse in a different way: it slowly dissolves copper out of your own supply pipes, which is what the blue-green staining is. That’s not cosmetic; that’s your plumbing leaving.
Get the water tested rather than guessing. NHDES-accredited labs handle it inexpensively, and a test tells you what you actually have instead of what a salesperson thinks you have. We list labs and resources on the local resources page.
A well adds real work to a winterization, which is exactly why a proper shutdown for a camp on a well is a different job from one on town water. The pump has to be shut down at the breaker, the pump line relieved, and the pressure tank drained completely — a tank full of water in an unheated crawlspace will crack.
And after a season of disuse, running the water for a while and considering a bacteria test is a sensible spring habit for a house that’s about to have guests in it all summer. More on that in the spring startup guide.
No power means no pump means no water — and no way to flush a toilet. In the rural towns, where outages run longest, that’s worth planning for: a few gallons of stored water for flushing, or a generator circuit that includes the well pump. It’s the difference between an inconvenient outage and an unlivable house.
Source: New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services, private well statistics. We handle pumps, pressure tanks, and switches as part of emergency and no-water work; whole-house treatment system design and well drilling are specialist trades and we’ll point you to one.
Tap the side of the tank from top to bottom. A healthy tank sounds hollow near the top and solid near the bottom; a waterlogged one sounds solid nearly all the way up. Combine that with short-cycling and you have your answer. Checking the actual air charge requires draining the system, which is a service call.
A submersible pump commonly lasts 10–15 years, sometimes considerably longer. What shortens it is short-cycling, running dry, and sediment. Most premature failures we see trace back to a pressure tank that failed and never got replaced.
Only after a test tells you your hardness number. Softeners solve hardness; they don’t solve iron, acidity, or bacteria, and plenty of people are sold one for a problem it doesn’t address. Also worth knowing: a softener is one more thing that must be drained every fall in a seasonal house.
That points at the water heater rather than the well — typically a reaction between the anode rod and sulfur bacteria in the tank. It’s often solved by changing the anode rod type and sanitizing the tank, which is much cheaper than treating the whole house for a problem the whole house doesn’t have.
Describe what you’re hearing and seeing — the pump, the gauge, the taps — and we’ll narrow it down before we get there.
Low pressure, a short-cycling pump, staining, or no water at all — describe what’s happening and we’ll narrow it down.
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