Well water · Putnam County

Well water testing in Putnam County

A private well is the only drinking water supply in New York that nobody is required to test. If you own one, you are the water utility — and the testing budget.

1. When a well test is compulsory

Selling, or buying a house on a well

This is the one moment a well test stops being advice and becomes a condition of the transaction. Lenders generally won't close on a property served by a private well without a satisfactory water test from an approved laboratory, and government-backed loans layer their own requirements on top of the lender's.

In practice that usually means bacteria and nitrate at minimum, often lead, and sometimes more depending on the lender, the loan type and what the local health authority requires. Two details catch people out:

• The sample often has to be collected by a third party — a lab technician, a licensed inspector or a health department representative — rather than by the seller. A result the seller collected themselves may be rejected.
• Results have a shelf life. Many lenders won't accept a test more than 60 to 120 days old at closing. A test done when the house was listed may need repeating.

Requirements vary by lender and loan programme, so confirm the exact panel with your loan officer before paying for a test. Ordering the wrong one and repeating it is the most common way this gets expensive.

After a flood, or after any work on the well

A new pump, a new well cap, a shock chlorination, or any period when the well head was submerged all end with a bacteria test. Chlorination in particular needs a follow-up test once the chlorine has flushed out, usually a week or two later — the point is to confirm the well is clean, not that the chlorine worked.

When something changed

New taste, new smell, new colour, or unexplained illness in the house. See common well water problems for what each symptom points at.

2. What to test for

"A well test" isn't one thing. Laboratories sell panels, and the cheapest panel answers the smallest question. Here's what belongs on each tier.

Every year, without exception

Total coliform bacteria and E. coli. Coliform indicates a pathway exists between the surface and your water. E. coli indicates that pathway is carrying faecal material. Cheap, fast, and the only test with a genuinely annual case.

Every year if you have young children, are pregnant, or have livestock or a septic system nearby

Nitrate and nitrite. Arrives from fertiliser, manure and failing septic systems. Colourless and tasteless, and it carries a specific infant risk — see the note on the problems page.

Every three to five years, and always before buying

• Arsenic — naturally occurring in some bedrock in the region, invisible, and a long-term rather than acute risk.
• Lead and copper — usually from your own plumbing rather than the aquifer, especially where the water is acidic. Sample first thing in the morning, before any tap has run.
• pH, hardness, iron, manganese, sodium, chloride — the general chemistry that tells a treatment contractor what equipment you actually need, and stops you buying the wrong filter.

Once, and then whenever the picture changes

PFAS — currently free in Putnam through the state pilot. Radon in water, if you've already found radon in the air. Volatile organic compounds, if there is or was a fuel tank, a dry cleaner, a garage or a landfill nearby.

3. Where to get it done

The result has to come from a laboratory certified under New York State's Environmental Laboratory Approval Program (ELAP). That certification is what makes a result acceptable to a lender, to the county, and to the state PFAS programme. Home test kits from a hardware store are fine for satisfying your own curiosity about hardness, and useless for anything official.

Most labs will either post you a sample kit with sterile bottles and a chain-of-custody form, or send a technician to collect. For a bacteria test, the sample has to reach the lab quickly and cold — typically within a day, refrigerated. Collecting on a Friday afternoon is how a test gets rejected.

4. What it costs

These are indicative ranges to help you budget, not quotes, and they don't include a technician's call-out where sample collection has to be witnessed. Prices vary by laboratory and by how many parameters you bundle — call two labs before booking. We'll publish quoted local prices here once we have them in writing.

5. Taking the sample properly

A surprising share of failed bacteria tests are failures of the tap, not the well. If you're collecting the sample yourself:

1. Use a cold tap with no aerator or screen — typically a kitchen or laundry tap. Remove the aerator if you can; bacteria colonise the screen.
2. Don't use a tap with a filter, softener or treatment unit upstream of it, unless you're specifically testing the treated water. For a well test you want raw water, ideally from a tap before any treatment.
3. Sanitise the tap as the lab instructs — usually wiping the spout with alcohol or dilute bleach.
4. Run the cold water for several minutes before filling, to clear standing water out of the pipes. The exception is the lead and copper sample, which is the opposite: first draw of the morning, no flushing.
5. Don't rinse the bottle. Bacteria bottles contain a preservative. Fill to the line, don't overfill, don't touch the inside of the cap.
6. Get it cold and get it moving. Cooler, ice pack, straight to the lab.

6. If the result comes back bad

Don't buy equipment on the strength of a single result. Confirm it with a second sample first — contamination is sometimes intermittent and sometimes a collection error. Then match the treatment to the contaminant: a carbon filter, a softener, a neutraliser and a UV lamp all solve different problems, and a contractor selling a whole-house system before seeing a lab report is selling equipment rather than a solution.

For bacteria the sequence is usually: find and fix the entry point, shock chlorinate, flush, re-test. UV disinfection is a permanent answer for wells that keep failing, but it treats the symptom — the entry point still matters.

7. Checking a contractor before you hire one

Any business drilling water wells in New York must register annually with the Department of Environmental Conservation before operating anywhere in the state, under Environmental Conservation Law §15-1525. Registration runs to 31 March each year. County code officers are instructed to check contractors against DEC's list, and you can ask for the registration number the same way.

Contractors must also file a Water Well Completion Report with DEC when a well is finished — which means there may be a record of your own well's depth, yield and construction on file, useful when you're trying to work out what you have.

We're building a checked directory of DEC-registered well contractors for Putnam and neighbouring counties, on the same basis as our septic installer directory: sourced from the official register, with registration numbers shown. Listing is free. If you're a registered well contractor, email [email protected].

More on private wells

• Well water: start hereThe section hub
• Common well problemsSmells, brown water, no water, sediment
• Your PFAS result explainedWhat the numbers mean and what to do
• The New York PFAS rebateFree testing and up to $5,000 for treatment