On a well in Connecticut? When the power goes out, so does your water

A well pump does not care how full your well is. No electricity, no pressure, no water: no taps, no toilets after the tank empties, no shower, and if you heat with a boiler that needs power anyway, no heat either. A power outage at a house on a well is a different event than the same outage on city water.

Here is the uncomfortable geography: private wells are a rural-Connecticut fact of life, and the rural counties are the ones carrying the heaviest outage burden per household in our data.

The overlap, in our numbers

A customer-hour is one metered account without power for one hour. In 2024, Litchfield County ranked first of the eight counties at 7,265 customer-hours of outage per 1,000 households, more than five times New Haven County's 1,337 (DOE EAGLE-I intervals over ACS 2021 households, computed 2026-07-15, methodology v1.4). In 2023 the leader was Windham County at 15,047, most of it from the December 18 to 20 storm. These are the hill-and-forest counties. We do not have a wells-per-town dataset yet, so we will not claim well counts; if you are reading this from a house with a pressure tank in the basement, you already know which group you are in.

What a typical event asks of you is different from what a storm asks. In Tolland County, the median recorded event of any size ran 1.5 hours over 2016 to 2024 excluding 2019: annoying, tank-emptying, survivable. But the county averaged 11.9 major events per year (1,000 or more customers, 2 or more hours), the longest tenth of all recorded events of any size ran 6.75 hours or more, and in a storm year the tail gets long: Litchfield's 2024 packed 52.2 percent of its whole year's outage burden into its worst three days. Three days without power on a well is three days without water.

What to actually do about it

Cheap and immediate: know your tank. A typical pressure tank holds a few flushes and a kettle's worth after the pump stops; fill jugs when a storm is forecast, and fill the tub if you expect a long one. Medium: a generator inlet and interlock installed by an electrician, so a portable generator sized for the pump's starting load can run the well safely. The full answer, for houses where days without water are not acceptable, is standby power sized with the pump's startup load in mind, and that is a conversation with an installer, not a blog post.

The useful first step costs nothing: look up your town's record on this site, note your county's storm concentration number, and decide what a three-day outage would mean for your household specifically. Storm-driven risk alerts, scored publicly for accuracy, are coming; the waitlist opens on this site first.

Where these numbers come from

Every statistic above is declared in this post's source file and machine-checked against the open dataset on every build. Customer-hours and rankings: DOE EAGLE-I raw 15-minute intervals divided by ACS 2021 households. Event counts and durations: EAGLE-I event records, window 2016 to 2024 excluding 2019 (documented federal-feed gaps). We claim no well statistics because we hold none. Definitions and limitations: how we compute things.