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✕Avoid
Dowsing for the well
Under controlled testing it performs at chance. The free state database beats it outright.
What it is
Walking ground with forked sticks or bent rods to locate groundwater before drilling.
The numbers
- Controlled trials have repeatedly found dowsing performs no better than chance at locating water.
- It appears to succeed often because in much of the country, a well drilled almost anywhere will find water at some depth. The stick gets credit for the aquifer.
- Most states maintain a free, public well-log database giving the depth, yield, and strata of every permitted well near you — often dozens within a mile.
- Drilling a dry or low-yield hole costs hundreds to thousands of dollars that the database would have saved.
Why it's here
It's listed here specifically because this is the page people visit looking for clever, and this is the most expensive 'clever' in the whole file.
The catch
No ill will toward dowsers — many are sincere, experienced people who know their own ground well, and local knowledge is genuinely valuable. It's the stick that doesn't hold up. Pull your state's well logs first; it costs nothing and it will tell you more in an hour than a day of walking.