Well pump running but no water?

Turn it off before you do anything else

A submersible pump is a motor with a stack of impellers on top of it, hanging on a pipe hundreds of feet down your well. That motor has no fan and no air around it. The only thing carrying heat away from the shell is well water flowing up past it. Take the flow away and the heat stays in the windings. A half or three quarter horsepower motor spinning in air can cook its insulation in well under an hour, and plenty go faster.

Nothing sounds wrong while it's happening, and that's the trap. The pump runs smooth and quiet right up until it doesn't run at all. So people keep flipping the breaker back on hoping it'll catch, stacking dry starts onto a motor that's already hot, each one pulling locked rotor current.

The wet end pays too. The thrust bearing carrying the whole weight of the water column is lubricated by water, and so are the shaft bearings and the seal faces. Run dry, they gall. Then the water comes back loaded with silt from the bottom of the hole, and that grit machines out the impeller stages on the way through.

So the first move is the breaker, not another reset. A pump sitting quiet for six hours costs you nothing but inconvenience. A pump left running all night can turn a small valve repair into a full pump job.

What the number on the gauge is telling you

Look at the gauge on the tank tee and write down what it reads. That number splits this problem apart faster than anything else you can do without tools, and it tells us what to load on the truck.

Zero, with the pump running and the needle dead still, means no water is reaching the tank at all. The pump is turning and nothing arrives. That's a well drawn down below the pump, a split drop pipe, a check valve letting the whole column fall back into the hole, or a wet end that's finished. It's the reading with the worst outcomes on this page.

Twenty psi, or any number that climbs partway and then stalls or sags back, means water is arriving but not enough of it. The motor is turning and the pipe is intact enough to lift, but the system can't make the pressure it's asked for. Worn impellers do this. So does a well drawing down while you watch, and so does a partly closed valve or a check valve stuck half shut. Watch the needle two full minutes, because creeping up slowly is a different story from stalling flat.

Sixty psi with no water at the faucets is good news and a completely different job. Full pressure at the tank means the pump, the well, the drop pipe and the switch are all doing their work, and the blockage sits between that gauge and your fixtures. A plugged sediment cartridge, a valve somebody left shut after working on the water heater, a frozen line in a crawl space, a treatment unit in bypass. Nobody pulls a pump for that.

The four things that cause this

Four causes account for nearly every one of these calls, listed in the order we find them rather than the order people guess them in. Start with the well. It isn't a tank of water, it's a hole in fractured rock, and the water standing in it is whatever the surrounding cracks hold there. Draw harder than those fractures refill and the level falls until it reaches the pump intake, and the pump is then spinning in air. The tell is timing: the water quit at the tail end of a pool fill, three showers and two loads of laundry, a dry stretch in September. If shutting the breaker off overnight brings your water back, that's your answer.

Second, water falling back down the well. The pump pushes water up a drop pipe and a check valve at the pump holds that column up between cycles. Split the pipe, crack a joint, corrode through the pitless adapter where the line leaves the casing, or let the check valve stop sealing, and the pump lifts water into the pipe and the pipe drops it right back into the hole. From the basement that looks identical to a dry well. Jet pumps have their own version: they depend on a foot valve holding a solid column of water in the suction line, and a leaking foot valve means the pump loses prime and spins against air.

Third, worn impellers. A submersible doesn't lift by suction. It lifts in stages, each one a spinning impeller handing pressure to the next, and thirty or forty stacked up is what gets water from 400 feet to a second floor shower. Those wear, and sand speeds it up. As the clearances open, water slips backward through the pump instead of getting pushed forward. The motor sounds exactly the same. It just isn't lifting. A pump that used to fill the tank in ninety seconds takes four minutes, then stalls at 30 psi, then one morning makes nothing. If pressure has been sliding for months, look here.

Fourth, a valve that's closed or has failed. It's the least likely cause and by far the cheapest, which is why it gets checked before anything comes out of the ground. A ball valve on the tank tee, the main house shutoff, a valve isolating a softener, a bypass somebody set last spring. Gate valves with round handles are the worst offenders, because one can sit three quarters shut and look wide open. A check valve stuck fully closed does it from the other direction: the pump runs, pushes against a closed door, and nothing moves.

Sorting them apart from your basement

You can get a long way with no tools. Start with the overnight test, because it's free and it settles the most common cause. Shut the breaker off, leave every tap closed so nothing drains what comes back in, and go to bed. In the morning restore power and watch the gauge. Pressure that builds normally means the well ran down, and the question becomes why the well can't keep up. Nothing after a full night of recovery means something mechanical is wrong.

Then listen. With the pump running and every fixture shut off, a pump moving water into a closed system builds pressure and you can watch it happen. A pump that's turning and lifting nothing sounds smooth and steady while the needle never moves. On a well with a leaking drop pipe or a check valve that's stopped sealing, you can sometimes hear water trickling back into the casing through the well cap in the minute after the pump shuts off. That sound is close to a diagnosis by itself.

Next, prove water isn't leaving on purpose. A hose bib cracked open, a toilet flapper passing water silently, a split line in a crawl space, an irrigation valve that isn't seating. A leak big enough to outrun the pump behaves exactly like a pump that isn't producing, and on the bigger lots out here the buried run from the wellhead is where it hides, because the ground swallows the evidence.

Last, put hands on every valve between the casing and the fixtures, and check the sediment cartridge if the gauge reads full pressure. Those two take five minutes and they're the only causes here a homeowner fixes outright. Everything past them needs meters at the wellhead.

What we measure at the wellhead

Three measurements sort this out before anything comes out of the ground, and none of them need a rig in the driveway. First, water level. We drop a level meter down the casing for a real static number, then run the pump and watch how fast the level falls and how far. A well with static at 40 feet that drops 300 feet in ten minutes and takes all night to recover is a yield problem, and no new pump changes that. A well that holds its level while the pump runs and still delivers nothing has a mechanical fault above the water.

Second, amp draw on each leg against the motor's nameplate. This one number separates most of the list. A motor moving water pulls close to its rated current. A motor spinning in air, or one with a wet end too worn to load up, pulls noticeably less, because there's nothing for the impellers to push against. A motor fighting a closed valve or a jammed impeller stack pulls more.

Third, insulation resistance from each motor lead to ground, so we know the motor and the wire are sound before anybody spends money assuming they aren't. On a well with history we'll run a camera down the casing too, which shows a split drop pipe or a bad joint directly, along with the water level and the fracture zones on the way down.

What the fix costs, and what happens next

The range is wide and that's the honest answer. A closed valve or a plugged cartridge is a service call. A pressure switch or a check valve at the tank tee runs a couple hundred dollars. A submersible coming out of a 400 foot rock well is the expensive end, because the drop pipe and wire come up with it and go back down new. A full pump job is the expensive end of this, and depth decides most of it.

Not every no water call ends in a pump. We've had customers ready to write a check for a new one who went home with a twenty dollar capacitor changed or a valve reopened. There are also wells nobody else wants to touch. One customer had a rock jammed against his old pump so it couldn't be pulled, and rather than tell him he needed a new well, we set a slim pump alongside it in the same casing.

Call 973-853-1550 and lead with the gauge reading: zero, partway, or full pressure. Add the well depth if you know it, whether the pump is a submersible down the hole or a jet pump on the basement floor, and whether shutting the breaker off overnight brought water back. That's enough for us to load the truck before we leave, and we can be there today on most no water calls.