Domestic Well Water Quality in Alberta

This tool was designed to help you explore water quality test data collected from private domestic wells over the past several years. You can view anything from a provincial overview right down to an individual test at a specific location.

In rural Alberta, 90 per cent of people use private well water in their homes for drinking, cooking, bathing or cleaning. If used for the above purposes, these wells do not require a license. Typically, the water well drillers submit a drilling report to Alberta Environment and Protected Areas on behalves of well owners when a new well is drilled.

Though wells are not regulated, Alberta Health Services offers information and advice on safe water for drinking, while Primary and Preventative Health Services provides the water testing free of charge. It is the responsibility of private well owners to check the quality and safety of their water supply. Contamination from natural sources or human activities can make well water look, taste, or smell bad. People should check the quality of their well water regularly. They can get advice from their local public health officers about how often they should do testing.

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Disclaimer

The Domestic Well Water Quality site does not contain data with respect to aquifer or geological information; should such information become available in the future, the AEPHIN team would strive to incorporate such information. In addition, please be aware that all the ground water data presented here only pertain to raw and untreated water, and specifically to wells used for drinking water. Other water sources (e.g., river, spring, etc.) and types of use are not part of this data visualization. This site is for visualization only. To retrieve official numbers, please download the original datasets that are posted on the Open Government Portal for routine chemistry and trace elements.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a domestic well?

A domestic well is a private well used for household drinking water. Domestic well water is a major water source for drinking, cooking, bathing or cleaning in rural areas. For more detail, please see Primary and Preventative Health Services' Domestic Well Water Quality Fact Sheets (AH, 2014a).

How do I get my well tested?

In order to have your water tested, please contact your local Alberta Health Services Public Health unit. You can identify your local public health location here: scroll down to the bottom of web-page and expand "Service Locations" to select a city or area that best match your location. Provided that you meet the criteria for submitting a water sample, Environmental Public Health staff at your local public health unit should be able to supply you with a kit to collect a water sample. Instructions for the collection of that water sample may be provided by the public health office, but are also available online.

What is a domestic well?

The requisition form asks for your well ID and well depth. There are a few ways to get this information:

• Use the Alberta Water Well Information Database (AWWID). Follow the instructions under the Introduction tab.
• Ask the previous owner of your home or the real estate agent.
• Contact the Alberta Environmental and Protected Areas Groundwater Information Centre
  by email at gwinfo@gov.ab.ca or call 780-427-2770.
• Read the Primary and Preventative Health Services and Alberta Health Services tip sheet for Finding Well ID and Well Depth.

How are data collected and processed?

Data are generated from private well owners who voluntarily submit water samples to the Alberta Centre for Toxicology (ACFT) at the University of Calgary for routine chemistry and trace elements testing.

Where can I find out more specific and technical information (e.g., methodology)?

Please consult the domestic well water reports for specific interpretations and analyses posted on the Primary and Preventative Health Services website.

How do the results of water tests get communicated with the residents that have submitted water samples?

Tests are done on the raw untreated water only. Results and interpretations are communicated back to the well owners by mail or phone, and well owners can follow up with local AHS Environmental Health Officers. If there are any exceedances of guidelines, parameters or measures, an Environmental Health Officer will follow up with well owners to discuss potential health concerns and possible treatment plans.

Is AEPHIN real-time?

AEPHIN is not real-time, but will be updated at least once a year to reflect new information and data. It is primarily focused on historical data for environmental factors that may relate to public health. The presentation of AEPHIN information on the website is arranged around local geographic areas (LGAs) to be consistent with health information used by Primary and Preventative Health Services and Alberta Health Services.

What is the “health boundary”? How are the local geographical areas defined?

Alberta Health Services divides the province into five large health service Zones, and these Zones are subdivided into smaller geographic areas called Local Geographic Areas. Currently, there are 132 Local Geographic Areas in Alberta. Please see the Primary and Preventative Health Services website for the definition of a Local Geographic Area and all Local Geographic Areas in Alberta. For further information, please go to the Local Geographic Area Lookups subsite under Public Health Information.

Who should I contact if I have questions with regard to my well water quality?

Please contact your local Alberta Health Services Public Health Inspectors.

Who should I contact if I want to find out about the history and specification (e.g., well-depth) of my water well?

Please contact Alberta Water Well Information Database for the water drilling report.

Who should I contact if I have questions about surrounding or nearby lake and river water quality?

Please check Alberta Environment and Protected Areas website for the environmental data on the surface water quality.

How Can I Print My Results?

To save as a pdf click “Save/Print Results.” If you are using the Chrome web browser simply choose ' Save as PDF' as the printer destination. For other browsers you may need to download a PDF saver (Bullzip, CutePDF, doPDF are some third party options) and follow their installation instructions. Once a PDF saver is installed you would select it as the printer destination.

Notes

Please see all published Primary and Preventative Health Services Water Reports for technical details and results. See the Domestic Well Water Quality in Alberta - Fact Sheets for definitions and interpretations.

Aesthetic Objectives (AOs) and Maximum Acceptable (MACs) are taken from Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality – Summary Table (Health Canada, 2014). Under each parameter with (i), “Health Considerations” section is the basis for MAC or other guideline derivation in drinking water only, not for some health effects at may occur at much higher concentrations. When stated as “None,” it does not necessarily mean that a particular element or parameter does not have any known (adverse) health effect at much higher concentrations than MAC or AO.

AOs and MACs are subject to change as Health Canada updates or generates new guidelines values from time to time for all parameters and trace elements used in the domestic well water quality and any other water related data on the AEPHIN website. These values are only as recent as April 1, 2015.

AEPHIN will update and maintain its webpages and databases at least annually to reflect new data or new or updated regulatory guidelines (e.g., Health Canada). Pleases not that these changes may create deviations from the results and analyses presented in the AH reports posted online in PDF format as they are static in nature.

References

Health Canada (2014). Guidelines for Canadian Drinking Water Quality – Summary Table. Water and Air Quality Bureau, Healthy Environments and Consumer Safety Branch, Health Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.

Terms

Median: In statistics and probability theory, the median is the number separating the higher half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half. The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one (e.g., the median of [3, 3, 5, 9, 11] is 5). If there is an even number of observations, then there is no single middle value; the median is then usually defined to be the mean of the two middle values (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median).

Mean: For a data set, the terms arithmetic mean, mathematical expectation, and sometimes average are used synonymously to refer to a central value of a discrete set of numbers: specifically, the sum of the values divided by the number of values (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean).