About Well Water Nerd
About one in eight Americans drinks from a private well, and nobody tests that water unless the owner does. The public record on what is in those wells does exist: decades of samples collected by the US Geological Survey, state health departments, state environmental agencies and university programs. It is scattered across dozens of databases in formats few people can read. Well Water Nerd gathers it into one place and answers the question a well owner actually has: what is common in the water where I live, and what should I test for.
The site is built and run by Nick, through HikerNerd LLC. Nick is on a private well himself, and his own certified lab report was the first one read by the lab report interpreter on this site. Corrections, questions and data tips go straight to him at nick at this site's domain.
Where the numbers come from
81 public sources: the USGS Water Quality Portal for every state, plus state programs such as homeowner test summaries, state well registries, PFAS sampling programs and regulated-site registries. The records cover 50 states, 5,000 measured county and town pages and 3.9M private wells. Every figure on a page names its source and date, and the full source list gives each agency, its license and the quirks of its data.
Well Water Nerd does not sample water. It reports what public agencies measured.
How a page is built
- Raw records are stored exactly as each agency published them, then converted to common units. Nothing is edited by hand.
- A place gets its own page only with at least 30 samples of some contaminant or 30 wells in a state survey. Thinner places count toward their county instead of standing alone.
- Results below the lab's detection limit count as samples and as zero for medians. A result exactly at a limit does not count as above it.
- Where an agency sampled wells because a problem was suspected, as with PFAS near a known source, the page says so beside the number, because those shares run higher than a random well would.
- The written summary on each page is drafted from that page's own numbers and nothing else. Software rejects any draft containing a figure that is not in the data, and a person reviews them before they publish.
- The data is free to download and reuse: every state as CSV, under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
How the site pays for itself
Some links go to test kits and filters from merchants who pay a commission, and the $29 lab report interpreter is a paid service. Installers who join the free in-home test program pay for introductions. None of that changes a number on this site, which products are listed for a contaminant, or what a page recommends testing for. Each affiliate link is labeled where it appears.