Have a tall, cool glass of water with confidence when you chlorinate your Johnsburg well

If you don't chlorinate your Johnsburg well each year, there's
no guarantee the water you're drinking is safe.

It feels good to get some work done around your Johnsburg home. You’ve worked up a bit of a sweat. You’ve worked up a thirst for a tall, cool glass of water, haven’t you? Will you go to the faucet, or the refrigerator door, and pour yourself a glass of water from the tap – from your well?

Maybe you haven’t thought about it, until the question came up now. You just assumed the water was fine. After all, it looks fairly clear. Take a whiff of the water. How’s that? No, all water doesn’t smell that way.

If you have a private well, such as many of the folks in Johnsburg, you can’t count on the village to make sure the water is safe to drink. If you haven’t taken care of your well – and that starts with an annual well chlorination – you might not even want to let the kids bath in that water.

See, if the municipal public works department is taking care of the water, there’s a good chance they’ve kept a regular schedule of chlorinating the village well. More than that, they’ve probably had the water tested, from time to time.

Without a regular, annual chlorination of your Johnsburg well, bacteria may have found a home in that glass of water you’re about to drink. If not bacteria, there are other elements that can make your water less than completely safe to drink.

Having a private well, it’s up to you to make sure the well water is regularly chlorinated and tested. You’ve probably got a neighbor who will tell you, “It’s easy. Just pour some chlorine into ‘the hole’ every year. That’s what I do.”

The problem is that your neighbor isn’t chlorinating his well properly. Is he taking precautions to avoid pouring the chlorine onto the pump and pipe connections in the well? If not, someday, when the well pump wears out, he’ll have a heck of a time disconnecting the well pump and fittings. The problem is that chlorine has a tendency to corrode and eat away at metal objects.

So, if you’re going to chlorinate your own Johnsburg private well, you’ll want to avoid damaging the pump and fittings. You’ll also want to flush the well after you’ve chlorinated. Some things seem easier than they really are or, at least, it’s essential that they’re done properly.

Another concern when chlorinating your own well is the possibility of damaging your own plumbing pipes. Most homeowners don’t know that there are two grades of copper – Type L and Type M. Type M is a low-grade copper and extra care is required because the chlorine can eat through the copper and cause leaks.

Type M copper has red lettering and markings on the outside of the pipe. The pipe wall with Type M copper is only half the thickness of Type L copper, which has blue lettering and markings.

A safe bet is to hire a qualified well technician to chlorinate your well. If you do that, you’ll know the well is properly cared for and you’ll drink that glass of water with confidence knowing you don’t have to worry about bacteria in the water.

Without proper well maintenance, your Johnsburg well could be on borrowed time

If you own your own well, you can't count on the city

to maintain your water supply. Timely maintenance

is essential.

You’ve lived in Johnsburg for how long now – 10 or 20 years? And you’ve never had a problem with the well water before? So, why should you worry about it now? After all, don’t ‘they’ say, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.”

Just because something isn’t broken doesn’t mean it won’t break. Besides, no one is saying that, if it’s not broken you should fix it. Simply put, without proper well maintenance, your well is living on borrowed time. One of these days, you’ll turn on a faucet, in your Johnsburg home, and nothing will happen.

Imagine if you bought a car and never changed the oil. For a while, it would run fine. But, one day, as you’re driving down the road, you’re going to have problems. Either the engine will overheat and stop running or it will stop running because the heat welded all the parts into one iron block.

The well outside your Johnsburg home works much the same way in that it’s designed to operate, just as a new car is designed to operate when it comes off the showroom floor. Without proper well maintenance, your well is going to work for a spell, but its days are numbered. Eventually, the well motor will burn out, the bladder inside the well tank will rip (which will cause the motor to cycle constantly until it burns out) or the electronics inside the well will corrode and leave you dry.

Additionally, if you’re not having the well water chlorinated, you and your family could be drinking and using water that’s unfit for man or fish. Without timely well water chlorination, your well water may contain unhealthy levels of bacteria.

If you’ve used your well for 10 years without any serious well maintenance, consider yourself darn lucky. If you’ve used the well for 20 years without well maintenance, or problems, that’s downright miraculous. And, keep in mind that, if you’re not the original owner of the home, the well and its components could be significantly older than that. Did the previous owner do a good job of maintaining the well?

If you’re in doubt about these questions, with winter only a couple months away, this is probably a very good time to have your well maintained. Johnsburg winters are often rough – lots of snow and cold. They’re even rougher if you’re stuck inside without any water.