What is your New Jersey pump installer license number?
Start here, before you ask about price. New Jersey licenses this trade. Drilling a well, and installing, repairing or replacing the pump in one, is work the state regulates through the NJDEP, and the person doing it is supposed to hold a current New Jersey well driller or pump installer license. That license carries a number. Ackerman's is 2198. Ask for the number out loud on the first phone call and listen to how fast it comes back.
The number is checkable, which is the whole point of asking. NJDEP's Bureau of Water Systems and Well Permitting keeps the record of who holds a license in this state, what class it is and whether it's current, and the state publishes that list. You can also go at it from the town side. Every legitimate well or pump permit pulled in West Milford, Vernon or Ringwood gets filed against a licensed person, so your township construction office or health department can tell you whether the name on your estimate has ever pulled a permit there.
A good answer is a number said from memory and then written on the estimate without being asked twice. While you have them, ask for a certificate of general liability insurance and workers compensation, sent to you by the agency rather than as a photo of a piece of paper. Somebody is going to be standing over an open hole handling 230 volts in your yard, and you want to know who's carrying that risk.
What is the warranty, in writing, and for how long?
A spoken warranty is worth nothing eighteen months from now, when the person who said it doesn't work there anymore. Ask for it on paper, with a start date, and read what it covers. The trap is the split between parts and labor. A submersible pump might carry a one to three year manufacturer warranty on the pump itself, but the pump is the cheap half of the job. Pulling 400 feet of pipe and wire out of the ground to get at it is the expensive half. If the paper covers the part and not the labor, a failure in year two still costs you a couple thousand dollars.
So ask the question in the form that matters: if this pump fails in month twenty, who pays to pull it? Then ask what voids the coverage. Sand, a well that runs dry, a lightning strike and somebody else touching the system are the common exclusions, and a contractor who names them plainly is telling you they've read their own paperwork.
Ackerman publishes five years on tanks. That's a printed number on a real component, not a phrase in a sales conversation. Pressure tanks fail more often than anything else on a well system and cost the least to fix, so a long written tank warranty is a fair test of whether an outfit expects to still be answering the phone when you call about it. Ask any contractor what their tank number is.
If I call at 9pm with no water, what actually happens?
Make them narrate it. Not the policy, the sequence. Does a person pick up, or does it ring into an answering service that takes a message, or does it go to voicemail until morning? If it's a service, who do they reach, and how long does that take on a Tuesday in February? What does an after-hours call cost, and is that a flat trip charge or a doubled hourly rate? Get the dollar figure before you need it, not while you're standing in a dark basement.
The other half of that answer is what happens before anybody gets in a truck. A well outfit worth hiring will spend ten minutes walking you through the free things first, because a fair number of no-water calls end with a tripped breaker, pitted switch contacts, or a disconnect somebody in the house shut by mistake. Ask directly: will you troubleshoot with me on the phone before you dispatch?
Our number is 973-853-1550, and our answer is that we can be there today on most no-water calls and we'll try to solve it with you on the phone first. What you're listening for from anybody, us included, is specifics. Reassurance about being available around the clock isn't the same as somebody telling you who answers at 9pm and what it costs.
Who shows up, the owner or a subcontractor?
This isn't snobbery about subcontractors. It's about who carries the memory of your well. A well system is a set of decisions made over decades: how deep the pump got set, what size wire went down, whether somebody left an extra check valve in the string. The person who knows those things fixes your problem in an hour. A stranger rediscovers them on your clock.
Ask who does the quoting and whether that same person does the work. Ask how long the crew has been there. Ask whether they keep a file on your address and can tell you what was done last time. A shop that's been in the same towns for years can often pull the record of your well before they drive out, and that changes how the day goes.
Ackerman has been at 735 Warwick Turnpike in Hewitt since 1952, four generations of the same family, owned by Don Slater. The value of that isn't the history, it's that the person who set a pump in Highland Lakes in 2009 is reachable when it acts up in 2026. Whoever you hire, what you want is a name, an address you could drive to, and a fair expectation that the same outfit answers the phone in ten years.
Do you own a drill rig?
This is the question almost nobody thinks to ask, and it's the one that tells you the most about the advice you're going to get. Drilling is sold by the foot. A contractor who owns a rig makes money when a hole gets made and makes more money when that hole is deep. That's not an accusation, it's arithmetic. It's worth knowing which side of it the person advising you is standing on before you take their recommendation on a decision this size.
Ackerman doesn't own a drill rig, and we say so out loud. New Jersey requires the borehole to be drilled by a licensed well driller, so on a new well we bring in a driller we've worked with for years and we do everything from the water up: pump, drop pipe and wire, pitless, trench, tank, wiring, disinfection and testing. Because we don't get paid per foot, when the right answer is smaller than a new well we can just say it.
That's what keeps the smaller answers on the table. Lowering the existing pump deeper into the standing column costs a few hundred to a couple thousand dollars and often solves a shortage outright, since a pump set at 200 feet in a 400 foot well is ignoring half the water in the hole. Deepening the well you have runs the rig back down the same casing at the per-foot rate, with no new permit, casing or pump. Hydrofracturing the existing borehole costs a fraction of drilling a new well. Ask whoever you talk to to price those three next to a new well, in writing. You're testing whether the cheaper answers are even on the menu.
Is the pump in stock or does it get ordered?
The gap between diagnosis and water is measured in whether the part is on the truck. A house with no water isn't a scheduling inconvenience, it's a family flushing toilets with buckets, and the difference between a shop that stocks pumps and one that orders them is an afternoon versus four days. Ask flatly: is the pump you'd put in my well sitting in your building right now?
Then get specific about your well, because stocking the common sizes is easy and it's the odd ones that strand people. Most residential submersibles here are four inch, 230 volt, half or three-quarter horsepower, ten gallons per minute, and any real supplier has those. The ones that take a week are the low-flow five and seven gallon per minute pumps that low-yield rock wells need, the one and a half and two horsepower motors a 550 foot setting calls for, and constant pressure units with their own controllers. If your well is deep or slow, ask about those specifically.
Ask about the rest of the string too, because the pump alone doesn't get water back on. A deep swap needs 400 or 500 feet of pipe and matched submersible wire, a torque arrestor, splice kit, safety rope, check valves, a pitless if the old one is shot, and a switch and gauge. A truck that arrives with the pump and nothing else turns a one-day job into two.
Will you test the water and give me the result on paper?
Any time a well is opened, the system should be disinfected and then tested, and you should end up holding the lab result. Pulling a pump means laying 400 feet of pipe on the ground, handling it, and putting it back in a hole that feeds your kitchen sink. Chlorinating afterward is standard practice, and a coliform test a week or two later confirms it worked. A contractor who calls that optional is skipping the step that protects you.
Ask what gets tested and who runs it. The result should come from a New Jersey certified laboratory on the lab's own paperwork, with your address and a date on it, not a verbal all clear. If you're buying or selling a house, the state's Private Well Testing Act sets the required parameter list for the transaction, and up here that includes gross alpha because of the uranium and radium in Highlands bedrock. That test has a shelf life at closing, so timing matters and your contractor should know the deadline.
Outside a real estate deal the paper is still worth having. Iron, manganese, hardness, pH and total coliform on a dated sheet give you a baseline, so five years later, when the water starts staining laundry or smelling like sulfur, you can see what changed and how fast.
Take these seven to three different contractors and write down the answers. You'll find the questions sort people quickly, and the sorting has almost nothing to do with who quoted lowest. When you want ours, call 973-853-1550 and ask them in any order you like.