Do this first
- Check the breaker for the pump, at the panel and at the disconnect box near the well or the tank. Reset it once. If it trips again, leave it off and call. A pump that trips twice is drawing too much current or shorted to ground, and cycling it makes both worse.
- Read the pressure gauge on the tank and write the number down. Zero, or a needle stuck at 20, means the pump isn't delivering. A needle that cycles between roughly 40 and 60 and holds means the well side is doing its job and the trouble is past the tank.
- Stop flipping the pump on and off to see if it comes back. A motor that's running dry or seized gets hotter with every start, and a small fault turns into a pump replacement in an afternoon.
- Gather what you know before you dial: the age of the pump, the well depth off an old invoice or the well record, whether it's a submersible in the ground or a jet pump in the basement, and anything odd the water was doing in the days before it quit.
- Skip the sites that ask for your zip code and promise to match you with local pros. Those are lead brokers. Your number gets sold, and three or four companies call you inside ten minutes.
- Call 973-853-1550. We'll run the free checks with you on the phone first and tell you straight whether this is a well call or a plumbing call, at no charge.
The dividing line runs through the pressure tank
Almost everything on the well side of your pressure tank belongs to a well contractor. The pump hanging down the well, the drop pipe and the cable that hold it there, the pitless adapter through the casing wall, the pressure switch, the tank itself, the well cap and the casing. Pulling a submersible out of a 400 foot well takes a hoist, a pipe reel, and a crew that has done it enough times to know what a string of pipe sounds like when it's about to part. None of that fits in a plumbing van.
Everything past the tank is plumbing. Supply lines, shutoff valves, fixtures, the water heater, a leaking tee under a sink, the softener and the filter housings downstream of the tank. A good plumber is exactly who you want for those, and a well contractor who tries to sell you a pump for a bad mixing valve is making the same mistake in the other direction.
Some outfits genuinely do both, and some of them do it well. What matters isn't the sign on the truck, it's whether the person who shows up owns the gear to pull a pump and how many they pulled last month. Ask it flat out on the phone: do you pull pumps yourselves, or do you sub that out? The answer takes two seconds and it decides whether your water comes back this afternoon or after a second company gets scheduled for Thursday.
Four different trades, and which one you actually want
People say plumber or well guy as though those are the only two options. There are four, New Jersey licenses two of them specifically for this work, and picking wrong costs you a day.
The well driller owns the rig and makes the hole. New wells, deepening, hydrofracturing, casing repair and sealing an abandoned well are all driller work, permitted through the NJDEP under that driller's license. You need a driller when there's no well, when the casing has collapsed, or when the well genuinely doesn't make enough water. A driller is not who you call at 8pm because the shower quit.
The licensed pump installer is the well pump trade, and it's a separate New Jersey license from drilling and from plumbing. Sizing, setting and pulling pumps, drop pipe and cable, pitless adapters, tanks, switches, control boxes, low water cutoffs, disinfection and testing. Ackerman holds NJ State License # 2198. This is the call for no water, weak pressure everywhere, a pump that runs and runs, short cycling, air spitting at the taps, or a breaker tripping on the pump circuit.
The plumber works from the tank into the house. Most plumbers won't pull a pump out of a 400 foot well, and the honest ones say so on the first call. That isn't a knock on the trade, it's equipment and repetition: a hoist, a reel, retrieval tools for a dropped pump, and a crew that does it weekly. Plenty of plumbers will change a pressure switch or swap a tank, and that's fine work. Getting several hundred feet of pipe and cable out of the ground and back in before dinner is a different business.
The electrician owns everything upstream of the well disconnect: the breaker, the panel, the circuit out to the wellhead, a generator transfer switch that isn't feeding the pump. If the panel is warm or the breaker is scorched, that's an electrician. From the disconnect down, including the splice at the pitless and the cable in the well, it's the pump installer, and a competent one meters that cable as part of diagnosing the pump.
- No water anywhere, pump silent. Pump installer.
- Pump runs constantly, pressure never builds. Pump installer. Could be the pump, could be the well running low.
- Breaker trips every time the pump starts. Pump installer first, electrician if the panel itself is damaged.
- Weak at one fixture, fine everywhere else. Plumber.
- Well goes low every dry September. Pump installer to reset the pump depth and add a low water cutoff. Driller only if it comes to deepening or fracturing.
- Cracked casing or a missing well cap. Pump installer for the cap, driller if the casing has failed.
Why three companies call you back after you filled out one form
Search well pump repair near me and a good share of the top results aren't contractors at all. They're directories and lead brokers. Their product is your phone number. You type in a zip code and a short description, the form thanks you, and that record gets sold, sometimes to one company, more often to three or four at once, sometimes to whoever bid highest on that zip code that hour.
That's why the phone starts ringing in ten minutes and why the first caller is the one with a dispatcher rather than the one with the right truck. Some of the buyers are real local shops. Some are national franchises that sub the work out to whoever is free. Some hold a plumbing registration and no New Jersey pump installer license at all. The site doesn't check who's licensed for well work in this state. It checks that the payment cleared.
Those leads are sold at a real price per call in this trade, and that cost lands in somebody's invoice eventually. The bigger cost to you is that nobody in the chain has any record of your well. No note about how deep the pump was set in 2011, no note about the low-flow pump the well needed, no note that the pitless was already fighting somebody the last time it came apart. You pay to have all of that rediscovered on your clock.
The fix is boring and it works. Call a company with a street address in your county that you could drive to. Ask for the New Jersey license number out loud. Ask who answers at 9pm in February. A shop that has been in your towns for years can often pull the file on your well before the truck leaves the yard, and that changes how the day goes.
Six things to have ready when you pick up the phone
A good well shop will troubleshoot with you before dispatching anybody, because a fair number of no-water calls end with a tripped breaker, pitted switch contacts, or a valve somebody shut during a boiler job in October. That conversation goes ten times faster if you have these ready.
- The symptom in plain words. No water at all, or weak water. Everywhere, or one faucet. Sudden, or fading over weeks. Spitting air, or brown, or fine but slow.
- The pressure gauge reading, right now. Go look. The single most useful number you can give us is what that needle says and whether it moves when somebody opens a tap.
- Whether the breaker tripped. And whether it held after one reset. There's a disconnect switch near the tank or the wellhead on most installs; check that too, since people shut them off and forget.
- The age of the system. Pump, tank and switch, as best anybody knows. A closing binder, an old invoice, or a date scrawled on the tank in marker all count.
- The well depth and the pump setting. Off the well record, an old estimate, or the tag on the casing if there is one. If you have no idea, say so. That's normal, and it's part of what a diagnostic visit establishes.
- What happened recently. A power outage, a lightning storm, a long fill on a pool, a house full of guests over a weekend, or work done on the electrical or the boiler. Those four events cause a lot of the calls we take.
What a diagnostic visit costs, and whether it comes off the bill
A daytime diagnostic visit is the cheapest step in this whole process, and we credit ours against the repair. That buys a licensed person with a meter at your wellhead for most of an hour: voltage at the disconnect and the switch, amp draw against the motor's nameplate, insulation resistance on the windings, ohms across the cable to see whether the fault is the motor or the wire feeding it, the tank's air charge, and the condition of the switch contacts. Nights, weekends and holidays cost more, either a higher trip charge or a higher hourly rate. Get that number before the truck rolls.
Then ask the credit question directly: if you do the repair today, does the diagnostic fee come off the invoice? Most shops apply it to the work when they perform the repair on the same visit, and many waive it outright on a job they end up doing. It's a normal question and the answer should be immediate.
What you shouldn't accept is a free estimate that turns into a pump quote with no test run at all. Ask for the readings. Insulation resistance in the megohms with a clean amp draw means the motor is alive and something else is wrong. A motor shorted to ground reads near zero, and that's an answer. It's shot is not an answer, and neither is a price with no reason attached.
This matters because plenty of these calls end without a pump. A pressure switch is an ordinary service call and the part rides on every truck. A dead start capacitor in a control box is less than that. A waterlogged pressure tank is a same-day swap. Paying for a diagnosis to find out which one you actually have is what keeps you out of a pump job you didn't need.
What any well contractor should tell you before starting
Once somebody has diagnosed the problem, the quote should read like an explanation, not a total. Every line has a part and a reason, and you should be able to repeat back why each one is there.
The other thing worth settling out loud, before anybody opens the well, is what happens if the diagnosis changes partway through. It does happen. A pump comes up and the motor tests fine, or the pitless is seized, or the pipe parts on the way out and now there's a retrieval job. The right way to handle that is simple: work stops, somebody explains what they found and what each option costs, and nothing else gets done until you've said yes. Ask for that commitment before the first wrench comes out.
- What failed, and what test showed it
- Whether the drop pipe and cable are being replaced too, and why
- The pump make, model, horsepower and gallons per minute going back in
- Whether the pump is on the truck today or has to be ordered
- What the warranty covers, for how long, and whether it pays the labor to pull it again
- Whether the well gets disinfected and a potability sample pulled afterward
- A written price before the work starts, not after
The short version
If the water is doing something wrong at every tap in the house, it's a well contractor, and specifically a licensed New Jersey pump installer. If it's one fixture, one appliance, or anything downstream of the pressure tank, it's a plumber. If the electrical panel itself is damaged, it's an electrician. A driller comes into it only when the hole in the ground needs to change.
You don't have to sort it perfectly before you call. That's our job, and we'd rather spend five minutes on the phone getting it right than send a truck to the wrong problem. Call 973-853-1550, tell us what the gauge reads and whether the breaker held, and we'll tell you which trade you need. If it's not us, we'll say so.