The Real Cost of Having a Borewell in the House

For quite a few days, I wanted to talk about this topic. But I couldn’t get a mood to write on it.

Today I felt, let’s do it…

If you are interested in drilling a borewell in your new or existing building, read this and then decide having a borewell.

Do you need a borewell in your house?

Let me explain with our own story.

We have 2 buildings right next to each other. Each building has G+3 floors. It’s not just owner building… we have rental units on both buildings.

Let’s calculate how many people we have in each building.

Building 1: 17

Building 2: 13

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Total:    30

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Total 30 members we have in our building.

This includes our count as well.

While constructing building 2, we decided to have a borewell because we have rental property, and water scarcity may arise.

I think in the last 6 months, we only used 1 time. That, too, was when we cleaned our sump.

The rest of the time, we purely relied on municipal water.

In municipal water, currently they are not charging based on water consumption. They are charging based on per house basis. It could be different based on where you stay.

Usually, local watermen don’t give sufficient water to houses just to get a bribe. If you properly give a bribe every month, they happily listen and leave enough water to your house.

For both of our buildings, we pay monthly ₹1000 extra to our local waterman who always maintains sufficient water and never closes our main valves.

If we don’t pay them a bribe, they simply close the valve, telling other houses are not getting water and don’t supply sufficient water.

If you face a water problem, pay a local waterman bribe, and your water scarcity won’t be there.

Ok, Let’s Calculate How Much It Would Cost to Maintain a Borewell:

Most of them never considered this when planning a borewell in their house. So, I’m breaking down the real cost of owning a borewell.

Let’s consider our case.

In our case, we drilled 1100 feet.

Drilling the borewell with the pump cost us around ₹3,10,000.

Most of them only think about the cost of drilling. That is not the only cost you need to calculate.

You need to include the maintenance charge that it would cost to maintain a borewell.

We are in Bangalore.

Here is how much it would cost to maintain a borewell every month.

For the 1100-foot borewell, we need a higher-capacity borewell motor. If I’m not wrong, we are using a 7 HP motor.

For a 7 HP motor to run, you will need a 3-phase power supply and a 6 KW load from the electricity department.

Do you know what..?

To have a 6 KW load, you need to pay every month ₹650 monthly to BESCOM (Electricity board).

Please note that it’s just a maintenance charge you will be paying.

Whatever the electricity bill you use will be added to the maintenance charge, and they don’t deduct from the minimum charge.

So, ₹650 is the price you will be paying every month just to take sufficient power to run the borewell.

Next:

The Borewell motor does need repairs.

Initially, you don’t get that much of repairs in the beginning. But once the motor is repaired, you will get frequent troubles.

This is based on my personal experience with the borewell that we have in our agricultural land.

To repair the borewell, you need to lift the motor and need to repair a motor. It costs a minimum of ₹7,000 anytime the motor stops working.

When you have a borewell, you need to run the borewell motor frequently, or it will get into trouble.

If your house comes under BBMP limit, then again you need to pay monthly fees of around ₹100 to Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB).

So after knowing all these costs and if you need a borewell for your house, go ahead.

For 30 members, we are hardly using borewells in our building.

If your building is own and doesn’t have rental units, don’t bother having a borewell.

It’s simply not worth it.

Checkout our house construction expenses to know our full house construction expenses.