Shared well and boundary fences - what are our rights?

[Blade]

We have a plot of land with a house with a well on it. When we bought the house, we agreed to give the builders, who have a house close to ours, access to the well. On the house purchase deeds, i believe there are another four years to go. We don't want to create any bad feelings with them but we plan to use the well's water, if it is up to scratch, as drinking water for the house. What are our rights to prevent them putting buckets into the well and contaminating our supply?

Also, we plan to build a fence around the plot of land where the well is located, but within their contract they still have access for the next four years. What would you recommend we do?

[Ron Avery]

A) Look at the plans drawn up at the time of the sale, areas of common access should have been marked at the time of sale and signed by all affected parties.

B) Go back to the Notaire with your contract of sale and ask THEM where you stand on this

I cannot understand your desire to use well water for drinking unless you have no source or town supply. Water ain't that dear here In any case you would need a good pump and filtration system, you are not really going to bucket it out are you??? 

 In any case water from wells has to be regularly tested for you to be allowed to drink it.

[Opel Fruit<P><BR>Opel Fruit, Dept. 53<P>]

Well water...

Ours just fails the potability test - on nitrate and bacteria.

However, we do use it for 1) Watering the garden, 2) Filling the pool, 3) As "Grey water" for the toilets.

Our Town Water is supplied on a seperate pipe network to the taps, and obviously the Chauffe-Eau.

Despite the apparent near potability, we still need to use a (fairly basic single stage) filter to catch what amounts to an awful lot of brown clag that gets pulled out of the well. When we filled the pool (15000L) this year, we went through 2 filter elements - it really was very mucky.

Another point, you need a pretty powerful pump to get a good flow and reasonable pressure. And a 100-200L pressure-capable tank. Our pump was about 160 EUR, plus fittings. The basic filter was about 100 EUR, the tank and fittings were 450 EUR. And the pump is rated at 1.5 kW, so it uses a fair amount of that very expensive French juice!

And you are "supposed" to have a method of chlorinating if you want to drink it.... very expensive and it does end up tasting like the swimming bath water.