Is Your Water Well Quietly Driving Up Your Electric Bill?
With energy costs climbing across every local electric provider and co-op in our area, most folks are doing what they can to keep their usage reasonable — adjusting the thermostat, swapping out light bulbs, being mindful of what's running. But there's one piece of the household that almost nobody thinks about when the electric bill creeps up: the water well.
Here's the honest truth, and we'll say it plainly because we're not in the business of overselling: a well that's running properly is not a big contributor to your electric bill. A healthy pump only runs when it needs to, draws the power it's designed to draw, and then shuts off. But a well that's not running properly is a different story. A system with a hidden problem can pull considerably more electricity than it should, month after month, and most homeowners never connect the dots.
We're not here to tell you that checking your well will solve your whole electric bill. It won't. What we're saying is this: don't let a fixable well problem quietly inflate a bill that's already going up for reasons you can't control. Fix what you can control. Below are the three most common well problems that run up electricity, how they work, what you can safely check yourself, and when it's time to call a professional.
1. A Pump That's Running All the Time
Your well pump is only supposed to run in cycles; it kicks on, builds your pressure up, and shuts off until you use water again. When a pump starts running more than it should, or never fully shuts off, that's continuous energy draw, and it adds up fast.
There are two common culprits:
A leak in the system. This can be a leak down in the well itself; a bad check valve, a cracked drop pipe, a failing pitless adapter, or a leak out in your service lines between the well and the house. Either way, water is escaping, your pressure keeps dropping, and the pump keeps kicking on to make up for it. In minor cases, you'll see the pump cycle on now and then even when no one's using water. In serious cases, it runs constantly. Every one of those run-minutes is electricity you're paying for and water you're never using.
A worn-out pump end. The "pump end" is the part down in the well that actually moves the water. Over years of service, the internal components wear down and the pump simply can't move as much water as it used to. So to deliver the same amount of water to your house, it has to run longer and work harder. A pump straining to keep up can end up running far more than its designed duty cycle, and in bad cases, almost continuously; all while delivering less. That's a double hit: more runtime, less to show for it.
What you can check yourself: If you have a working pressure gauge on your system, you can watch it. Most residential systems are set to cut on and cut off in a set range, commonly on at 30 and off at 50, or on at 40 and off at 60. With no water running anywhere in the house, the needle should hold steady. If it slowly drops and the pump kicks on by itself with everything shut off, that's a red flag for a leak. And when you are using water, the needle should climb all the way up to the cut-off point and the pump should shut off, if it never reaches cut-off, or the pump seems to run and run, that's worth a professional look.
A word of honesty here: watching the gauge is a helpful sanity check, but it won't tell you the whole story. Gauges can be inaccurate, and the only way to truly know whether your pump is running more than it should is to measure the amperage directly. That's part of what we do on a service call, and it's not something we'd ever recommend you check yourself, because it means working around live electricity inside the pressure switch or control box. Please leave that part to us.
2. A Waterlogged Pressure Tank (Short Cycling)
This is the one most homeowners have never heard of, and it's one of the sneakiest. Your pressure tank isn't just a storage tank, it uses a cushion of air (in most modern tanks, held behind a rubber bladder) to deliver water between pump cycles. That air charge is what lets you run a faucet for a bit without the pump having to kick on every few seconds.
When a tank loses its air charge, or the bladder fails, the tank becomes "waterlogged," meaning it's full of water with little or no air cushion left. Now there's almost no reserve, so the pump kicks on and off rapidly every time you use even a little water. That's called short cycling, and here's why it costs you:
Every single time an electric motor starts, it pulls a big surge of power called inrush current, often several times the motor's normal running amperage, for a brief moment before it settles into its steady draw. One start now and then is no big deal. But a short-cycling pump might start many times more often than it should, and you're stacking up all those high-draw inrush spikes over and over. On top of that, each start generates heat in the motor and wiring, and with the pump firing so frequently, that heat never gets a chance to dissipate. That extra heat makes everything run a little less efficiently; and, just as importantly, it's brutally hard on the motor and wire, which can turn an energy problem into an expensive failure down the road.
What you can check yourself: This one you can safely check, and we're happy to walk you through it, because checking and correcting an air charge is about as basic as well maintenance gets. Here's how:
Turn off the power to your pump at the breaker. This is important, don't skip it.
Open a faucet (an outside spigot works well) and let the water run until it stops completely. You're draining the pressure out of the tank.
Find the air valve on your tank. It looks just like the air valve on a car tire, usually up on the top of the tank. If your tank is blue or red, it's most likely a bladder tank, which is exactly the kind this check is for.
Check the air pressure with an ordinary tire gauge, just like you'd check a tire. The rule of thumb: your air charge should be 2 pounds below your cut-in pressure. So if your pump cuts on at 30, you want the tank reading right around 28 psi with the water drained off. If it cuts on at 40, you're looking for about 38 psi.
If it's low, you can add air with a regular air compressor or even a bicycle pump, a little at a time, re-checking with your gauge until you hit that target number. Go slow, it doesn't take much.
Turn the power back on, let the system build pressure, and you're done.
If the tank won't hold air at all, you add air and it just leaks right back out, or you get water coming out of the air valve; that usually means the bladder has failed, and the tank will need to be replaced. That's where we come in.
And look, if any of that doesn't sound like something you want to tackle, that is completely fine. That's what we're here for. We do this every single day, we can check and set your air charge in a few minutes, and we'd rather do it right than have you guess. No pressure, no judgment.
3. An Electrical Short in the System
This is the big one that nobody, and we mean nobody, thinks about, and it's the one you genuinely cannot see or diagnose on your own.
Over time, the wiring that runs down your well to the pump motor can break down. Insulation cracks, connections corrode, a splice goes bad, and you end up with an electrical short or a current leak to ground somewhere in the system. When that happens, your system can draw extra electricity, sometimes a lot of extra electricity, without any obvious change in how your water seems to be working. The faucets still run. The pressure seems fine. But the meter is spinning faster than it should, and you're paying for it every month.
This is the one where we've seen it with our own eyes, more than once. We've had customers call and say, "My electric bill is through the roof — can you come check my well?" We go out, run our tests, and find a short down in the system. We fix it, and their bill comes right back down to normal. We've seen the same thing with leaks and worn pumps. The point isn't that your well is the reason for your whole bill, it's that a real, fixable problem was quietly inflating that bill, and once it's corrected, things return to normal.
Why you can't DIY this one: Finding an electrical short takes more than a glance. We check the pump's amp draw against the manufacturer's specifications for that exact motor, and we run a Megger test, including insulation resistance testing, to actually locate current that's leaking where it shouldn't be. Without those tools, the training to use them, and access to the manufacturer's specs, there's simply no way to confirm whether a short exists. This is squarely professional territory, and it's one of the most valuable things a proper well check can uncover.
The Bottom Line
Energy prices are going up, and a lot of that is out of your hands. But your well doesn't have to be part of the problem. A healthy well system sips electricity and does its job quietly in the background. A well with a hidden leak, a worn pump, a waterlogged tank, or an electrical short can draw far more than it should, and you'd never know just by turning on the tap.
The good news is that every one of those problems is fixable, and fixing them brings your well's power usage back down to where it belongs. We're not promising to solve your whole electric bill. We're offering to take one thing off the list that you actually can control.
If your bill has jumped and you can't pin down why, or you just want peace of mind that your well isn't costing you more than it should, give us a call. Checking this is what we do, and we're always happy to help.
