No Water in the House: The 10-Minute Check Before You Call a Well Company

September 4, 2026

If your Henderson County house has no water this morning, the odds are good that the fix is a breaker, a pressure switch, or a capacitor, not the pump. Ten minutes at the electrical panel, the pressure tank, and the well head will tell you which, and it will turn “we’ll have to come look” into a $150 to $450 same-day repair instead of a guess. Here is the check, in the order a well man does it, and what each result means.

Two safety notes first. The well pump breaker carries 230 volts. You will be looking at things and resetting a breaker, not opening a control box or touching wiring. And if the breaker trips again the moment you reset it, leave it off. That is a short, and every reset pushes more current through a failing motor or a chafed wire.

Minute 1: Is it the well, or the house?

Open a cold tap. Nothing at all, or a sputter of air and then nothing? Then check whether every tap is dry. One dry faucet with the rest working is a frozen or failed line or a bad valve inside the house, and a plumber’s problem. All dry, hot and cold, upstairs and down, means the well system.

If it is January, ask whether anything froze. Hendersonville’s January mean low is 26.5 degrees and the ridges in Flat Rock, Dana, and Edneyville run colder. The well itself will not freeze (the water is hundreds of feet down and the pitless adapter carries it out of the casing below the frost line, which the state plumbing code puts at least 12 inches below grade with piping 6 inches below the frost line), but the tee, gauge, and switch in an unheated well house or a drafty crawlspace will, and so will an exposed line. Frost on the tank tee is your answer, and a space heater in the well house is sometimes the entire repair.

Minutes 2 to 3: The breaker

Find the well pump breaker in the panel. It is usually a two-pole breaker labeled “well” or “pump.” Is it tripped? Some breakers sit in a middle position when tripped; push it fully off, then on.

• It resets and holds. Wait a minute and try a tap. If water returns, you had a power blink or a nuisance trip, common after the thunderstorms that roll off the ridge in summer. Watch it; if it trips again in a day or a week, the pump is drawing high current and is telling you something.
• It trips again immediately. Leave it off. That is a shorted motor, a shorted wire in the well, or a failed control box. This is a service call, and knowing it is a “trips instantly” call tells the crew to bring a meter for the pump leads and, possibly, the hoist.
• It was not tripped. Move on. The problem is downstream.

Minutes 4 to 5: The gauge

Go to the pressure tank, in the basement, crawlspace, utility room, or well house, and read the gauge on the tank tee. This single number sorts most no-water calls.

• Zero, and silence. The pump is not running. It is the switch, the control box, the wire, or the pump. Keep going to the switch.
• Zero, and a hum from the control box or from the well. The pump is being told to run and cannot. On a three-wire pump that is most often the start capacitor in the control box on the wall, a $200 to $450 repair. On a two-wire pump it can be a locked or burned motor. A hum with a click every few seconds is the motor’s thermal overload cycling; stop resetting and call.
• Zero, and the pump is clearly running (you can hear it, the gauge does not climb). The pump is moving but delivering nothing. A broken drop pipe or a split at a coupling down the well, a pump that has worn out its impellers, or a well whose water level has dropped below the pump intake. In a dry September on a ridge well, the last one is common; the well is not broken, and the pump will be if it keeps running dry.
• Forty psi or more with no water at the taps. Good news. The well system is fine. The problem is a closed valve, a frozen line, a plugged filter cartridge, or something inside the house. Check the whole-house sediment filter; a filter that has not been changed since spring can stop a house.
• Pressure that climbs to 30 or 40 and sticks there while the pump runs and runs. The pump cannot reach cut-off pressure. Worn impellers, a leak, or a well being pumped faster than it recovers.

Minutes 6 to 7: The switch

The pressure switch is the small gray box on the tank tee with a cover held by a nut. Do not take the cover off; you can hear and see what you need with it on.

• Rapid clicking, on-off-on-off every second or two. Short cycling, and the house probably has some water, just badly. That is a waterlogged pressure tank or a bad check valve, and it is on the tanks and switches page. Tap the tank from top to bottom: a good tank rings hollow at the top; a waterlogged one thuds all the way up.
• Silent, gauge at zero. The switch may have failed open, or its little sensing tube may be plugged with the iron sludge that acidic mountain water leaves everywhere. One trick: tap the side of the switch once, firmly, with the handle of a screwdriver. Pitted contacts sometimes make one more time. If the pump starts, you have found your problem and bought a shower; it is a $150 to $350 switch.
• A low-pressure cut-off switch with a lever. Some homes on low-yield wells have a switch with a small lever on the side. If the pressure ever fell below its floor, it shut the pump off to protect it and will not restart on its own. Hold the lever up until the gauge passes about 30 psi and release. If it holds, the well pumped down and recovered, and you should have the pump setting and yield looked at before it happens again.

Minutes 8 to 9: The well head

Walk out to the well. It is a 6-inch steel or PVC pipe that should stand at least 12 inches above the ground, capped, usually with a conduit for the wire.

• Is the cap on and tight? A missing or loose cap is a bacteria problem more than a no-water problem, but note it.
• Is the casing buried? Landscaping that has buried the well head is a surface-water path; note it.
• Is there water pooling around it? Water welling up around the casing while the pump runs is a broken pitless adapter or a burst line at the well, and it explains a pump that runs and runs.
• Any sign of a lightning strike? Scorching at the conduit or a blown cap after a storm points at the control box and the pump’s electrical.

Minute 10: Write it down

Now you can make a useful call. Tell the well company:

1. What the house is doing: nothing, sputtering, weak, or cycling.
2. The breaker: was it tripped, did it hold, did it re-trip.
3. The gauge reading and whether the pump is silent, humming, or running.
4. The switch: silent, clicking, or restarted with a tap.
5. Anything at the well head.
6. The weather: storm, outage, hard freeze.
7. The well depth, if you can find it. It is stamped on the plate the state requires on the casing (with the install date and horsepower), or on the well record from Henderson County Environmental Health, or on the paperwork from the last pump job.

With that, a company can tell you on the phone whether you are looking at a switch or capacitor call ($150 to $450) or a pump pull ($1,200 to $3,500 by depth, on the pump replacement page), and can put the right parts on the truck. What you should not accept is a pump quoted over the phone with none of this asked. Most no-water calls in this county are the cheap parts, and a crew that skips the diagnosis is either guessing or selling. The emergency page has the fee for the time of day; the pricing page has every number in the trade.

Why this county produces so many of these calls

Three reasons, and they are worth knowing so the next call is later. First, the water is acidic and carries iron. Groundwater in the Blue Ridge granite and gneiss commonly tests at pH 5.5 to 6.5, and it corrodes the steel tank tee, pits the switch contacts, and plugs the switch tube with iron sludge. A neutralizer and a sediment filter ahead of the switch make switches last years instead of seasons. Second, the wells are low-yield. The U.S. Geological Survey puts the average reported yield in these fractured-rock aquifers at about 15 to 20 gallons per minute and notes that ridge and slope wells are much thinner, so a pump set too high or sized too big runs dry every dry September. Third, the county is full of people new to wells; Henderson County grew from 106,740 people in 2010 to 116,281 in 2020, all of it from people moving in, and a lot of them bought a pressure tank without knowing it. If that is you, the FAQ is the short course.

The one thing to do before the next time

Check the tank’s air precharge once a year. With the pump off and the tank drained, the air valve on top of the tank should read 2 psi below the switch cut-in: 28 psi for a 30/50 switch, 38 for a 40/60. A tank that has lost its charge short-cycles the pump thousands of extra times a year, and short cycling is what kills pumps in this county. Five minutes with a tire gauge is the cheapest pump insurance there is.