Shallow Well - What are copper tubes for?

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Moderator Post (s) for this thread: > Shallow Well pump by Billhart on 12/29/2006 > Wells by Billhart on 12/30/2006

My girlfriend is selling her house and an issue has come up in the home inspection.

The house has a shallow well water system. No pump down a hole, just a water pump feeding an accummulator tank and the house system.

In the basement, two galvanized pipes exit the wall (I assume from the well) and connect to the pump inlet. Additionally, through the same wall penetration, there are two flexible copper tubes (about 3/8"?). They are not connected to anything, are open ended, about 2' long and just hang there.

This issue is that the buyer's home inspector noted these tubes and says they can be associated with an oil tank that may be buried in the front yard.

Now, her oil tank is in the corner of the basement. A copper tube runs from the tank to the boiler which is in the center of the basement. The copper pipe is buried in the slab. diving into the slab at the tank and popping up out of the slab at the boiler. Since the slab was poured during the house construction, this tells me that this is the original configuration of this heating system with possibly the original tank. There are no other tubes which I can find that go into the slab.

I suspect the two copper tubes near the water pump are associated with the well. But I don't know what their purpose is. If I could explain them as associated with the well, maybe we could convince the buyers that there is no tank buried in the yard.

They are demanding written documentation of removal of the buried tank. Problem is if the tank doesn't really exist there is no documentation. It's hard to prove a negative.

I'd estimate the house is 40-45 years old.