How much water is a good well?


The answer to this question depends on your planned use, county requirements and the availability of water in the area where your property is located. In general counties require a minimum of 1 gpm sustainable production for a minimum of 4 hrs, banks that lend on homes are usually looking for a minimum of 2 gpm averaged over a 2 hr period. In order to determine how much water you need you first need to look at the number of faucets and fixtures in your home. Today’s American home usually has 2 bathrooms (1 faucet ea, 1 toilet, 1 shower = 3 fixtures) a full kitchen with a sink (1 fixture), a laundry room with washer/dryer and laundry sink (2 fixtures). If you put all that together, a home of this nature has approximately 9 fixtures installed. If you use low flow toilets, faucets and shower heads your demand out of each fixture is a little less than 2 gpm. So in this situation if you were to open every faucet, flush every toilet, turn on every shower in this home you would be using 18 gpm. Most homes don’t operate this way so a good production for a home is around 10 gpm. 


If your well doesn’t produce 10 gpm that’s ok. If you have a well that produces less than this amount you most likely will or already have a water storage tank installed on your property. Typically that tank is between 3-5000 gallons in capacity and has a secondary (booster) pump connected to it that provides a higher gpm to the home. There are many areas of Southern California where 5 gpm is considered a good well and if pumped into a storage tank at a rate of 24 hours per day will provide 7200 gallons of water into a storage tank. As your driller we can provide you well logs from wells completed in your area to help better gauge what you might expect to get when drilling a well. 


There are many work arounds to provide a sustainable source of water to your home and property, most of the time this just comes down to design. We, here at Heritage Well can help you sort this information and come up with a plan for your project. Send us an email here or give us a call at 951-763-2210 to further explore this topic!

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