Common well water problems in New York and what they mean

Routine

The water smells like rotten eggs

That's hydrogen sulfide gas. There are three common sources and one simple test that tells them apart: run the cold tap and the hot tap separately.

• Only the hot smells — almost certainly the water heater, where the magnesium sacrificial anode reacts with sulfate in the water. Replacing the anode rod with an aluminium or powered one usually ends it. A plumber's job, not a well contractor's.
• Both hot and cold smell — the sulfide is coming up with the water, either dissolved out of the bedrock or produced by sulfur bacteria in the well or the plumbing. Neither is generally a health hazard at the concentrations that produce a noticeable smell, but sulfur bacteria produce a slime that fouls fixtures and can shelter other bacteria.
• Comes and goes, worse after the house has been empty — bacterial, more often than not.

Fixes run from shock chlorination of the well (temporary, often repeated annually) to an aeration or oxidising filter system. Before spending money on treatment, get a bacteria test — the smell itself isn't the reason to treat, but what it reveals about the well might be.

Routine if gradual · Now if it follows rain

The water is brown, orange, red or yellow

The distinction that matters is when it happens.

If it's been getting worse gradually

Iron and manganese, dissolved out of the bedrock, and both extremely common in Hudson Valley groundwater. Iron stains laundry and fixtures rust-orange; manganese stains them brown-black and shows up as specks in the toilet tank. Neither is an emergency. Both are aesthetic problems that are genuinely miserable to live with, and both are treatable with an oxidising or greensand filter sized to your test results — which is why you test first and buy equipment second.

If it turns brown after heavy rain, snowmelt or flooding

This is different, and it's serious. Groundwater doesn't change colour in a day. Water that turns turbid after a storm means surface water is reaching your well — through a cracked or short casing, a failed or missing well cap, a shallow well, or a well head sitting in a hollow that ponds.

Surface water carries whatever is on the surface: manure, road runoff, septic effluent, fertiliser. Stop drinking it, test for total coliform and E. coli straight away, and get the well head physically inspected. Chlorinating the well without fixing the entry point just resets the clock until the next storm.

Where to get a bacteria test in Putnam County →

Now

There's no water at the tap

Work through it in this order — cheapest to most expensive, and roughly most likely to least.

1. The breaker. Well pumps sit on their own circuit, often a double-pole breaker in the main panel and sometimes a separate disconnect near the pressure tank. A tripped pump breaker is the single most common cause of no water. Reset it once. If it trips again immediately, stop — that's a fault, not a nuisance trip.
2. The pressure gauge on the pressure tank. Zero means no water is being delivered. Normal running range is typically 30–50 or 40–60 psi.
3. The pressure switch — the small covered box on the pipe near the tank. Burnt contacts inside are a common and inexpensive failure. The work is live and dangerous; this is a contractor's job.
4. A frozen line, in winter, if the well head or the line into the house runs through an unheated crawlspace or a shallow trench.
5. A failed pump. Submersibles last a long time but not forever. Pulling one is a rig job.
6. The well has gone dry — after a long dry summer, or if the water table has dropped. Usually preceded by weeks of sputtering taps and air in the lines. See below.

If it's a whole-neighbourhood outage, it's power. If it's only your house and the power is on, it's your system.

Soon

The pump runs constantly, or clicks on and off

Two different faults with the same consequence: the pump is cycling far more than it was built to, and it will fail early.

Rapid on-off cycling every few seconds

Usually a waterlogged pressure tank. The tank holds a cushion of air above a bladder; when the bladder fails or the air charge leaks away there's no reserve, so the pump starts and stops on almost every cup of water drawn. This is the most common well repair there is, and it isn't expensive if caught early. Ignored, it burns out a pump that costs several times more.

Runs and runs without building pressure

• A leak between the well and the house — look for a permanently damp patch in the yard, or a running toilet indoors.
• A failed foot valve or check valve, letting water drain back down the well between cycles.
• A worn pump that can no longer reach cut-off pressure.
• A dropping water level — the pump is drawing the well down faster than it recovers. Sputtering taps, air spitting from faucets, and water that runs clear then cloudy all point this way.

Turn the pump off at the breaker if it's running continuously and you aren't using water. Running dry destroys a submersible pump quickly.

Soon

There's sand, silt or grit in the water

Fine sediment clogging faucet aerators and shower heads, or settling in the bottom of the toilet tank. Wells aren't supposed to produce solids.

• In a drilled bedrock well — often rock fragments from a deteriorating casing or a fracture in the borehole, or a pump hanging low enough to stir the bottom sediment.
• In a shallow or gravel-packed well — usually a failing well screen.
• Appearing suddenly after work was done — a new pump set at the wrong depth.

A sediment filter is a symptom fix, not a repair; it keeps the appliances alive while you deal with the cause. Sediment arriving alongside a pressure drop or a change in taste warrants a contractor putting a camera down the well. Casing failure also means anything in the soil can get in, so a bacteria test belongs in the same visit.

Soon

Blue-green stains on the sink, or a metallic taste

Blue-green streaks below a tap are copper, dissolved out of your own plumbing by acidic water. Much of the bedrock in this part of New York yields naturally soft, low-pH groundwater, which is mildly corrosive.

That matters for a reason beyond the staining: water aggressive enough to dissolve copper is aggressive enough to dissolve lead from older solder, brass fittings and fixtures. If you have blue-green staining, test for lead and copper — and take that sample first thing in the morning, before anyone has run a tap, because that's when the concentration is highest.

The usual treatment is an acid-neutralising filter (calcite) or a soda ash feeder, sized to the pH and hardness on your test.

Soon

The water tastes salty

Two candidates, easy to separate.

• You have a water softener — a stuck valve or a fault in the regeneration cycle can push brine into the supply. Bypass the softener for a day and see if the taste goes.
• You don't have a softener — the likeliest source in this region is road salt. Wells within a few hundred feet of a state or county road that's salted through the winter, or downhill of a salt storage site, can pick up sodium and chloride, usually worst in late winter and spring. Ask the lab for sodium and chloride specifically; they aren't on a standard panel.

Chloride won't be removed by a carbon filter or a softener. The options are reverse osmosis at the tap, a deeper or relocated well, or in some cases a claim against whoever is doing the salting.

Routine

The water looks milky, then clears

Fill a clear glass and watch it. If it clears from the bottom upward within a minute or two, that's dissolved air coming out of solution — harmless, and usually a sign of air being drawn in somewhere, a failing check valve, or a well whose water level is close to the pump.

If it clears from the top downward, or doesn't clear at all, that's suspended solids. Go back to the sediment and turbidity sections above, and treat it as a bacteria question until a test says otherwise.

Now

The water smells of fuel, solvent or chemicals

Stop drinking it and stop bathing in it until you know what it is. In this region the most common cause is a leaking heating oil tank, either yours or a neighbour's, buried or in a basement. Old underground tanks at properties that switched to gas decades ago are a recurring source.

Call the Putnam County Department of Health on 845-808-1390. Petroleum contamination is investigated and there are state mechanisms for spill response. Don't chlorinate the well — it won't help, and it can make identification harder.

The problem with symptom-led testing

That's the argument for testing on a schedule rather than testing when something goes wrong — and right now, in six New York counties including Putnam, the PFAS half of that test is being paid for by the state.

The free PFAS testing programme → · What else to test for → · Already have a result? What the numbers mean →