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NW Missouri | Do it.
My grandpa passed on the opportunity to get rural water at the farm where I live back when it was first offered because he had a good well. A couple decades later the well wasn't keeping up quite as good anymore and he was regretting his decision, but at that point he was going to have to pay to extend the line 3/4 of a mile to get it to his place, which was going to cost quite a bit. Within a few years after that the old house fell into disrepair and no one was living there anyway. Then around 2000 a neighbor built a new house and paid to run the water line right past our place to get to theirs. So when I built a new house in 2015, I built there partially because there was rural water there already. Cost me $2-3k total to hook up. I still use the old well to water livestock and we can turn a valve in the house to use the well on the outside spigots, toilets, and showers (dishwasher, washing machine, water heater, sinks all use exclusively rural water). Can also turn it the other way and run rural water out to the livestock (because nowadays the well can't keep up with more than about 60 head of cattle). It's awfully nice to have that option.
In the next county over, hookups are $5k just in fees before any work is started, and on certain branches of the line they won't allow any more hookups because they don't have large enough lines to handle any more. I know of 2 different people who pay $25 a month in perpetuity to keep an unused meter active on farms they will probably never use just to keep the ability to have rural water there if they ever need it (or ever decide to sell).
As far as chemicals, I'm sure the rural water is safer to drink than our well water. Our well is a couple hundred feet out in a bottom field that has been sprayed and fertilized over the top of every year for decades. The water has never been tested to my knowledge. Rural water is tested regularly. Also, I've worked on our well and have seen what the water looks like at the top (my wife has not lol). | |
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Do we want rural water?
