Hoping a more experienced Mustachian can help me out here. The answer may just be, "Your well is dry, you idiot," but I want to make sure we're not missing something else.
We have a well that is shared with a downhill neighbor. We also have a whole-house water reverse osmosis filter that holds several hundred gallons of water. (The neighbor does not have a filter.) We just moved here a couple of months ago, and although it's typically a rainy place, we haven't had rain since we arrived. But that's pretty normal for summer in this area.
Yesterday our well-sharing neighbor drove up to ask if we were having water pressure problems. We had noticed that the pressure was a little low when two things were running at once, but we hadn't thought much of it. Just thought it was a quirk of our new-to-us house. He turned off the well water to both houses for a couple of hours, and during that time the pressure rose to nearly 50psi (not sure what it was before, but he said normal is in the 30s -- not sure if that's normal during a drought, though). We went out for a hike with some friends, and when we returned, he had turned on the water to his house and said it was running well. We turned ours on and had only a trickle.
Then we remembered the huge tank connected to our water filter and went out to look at it. We figured we probably had only a trickle because we had a big tank to fill, whereas our neighbor's water was going directly from the well to his house. There's a SCALA2 pressure boosting pump connected to the tank/filter, and its warning lights were on for low tank and high pressure (yeah, high...?). We couldn't tell by listening whether there was water flowing from the well into the tank, and although levels are marked on the side for 100, 200, etc. gallons, the tank is black, so those marks aren't very helpful. I read something online about how the pressure won't reset itself if there's a dry well issue, so we pressed the reset button on the SCALA2, and it made some happy whirring sounds and the warning lights went away. Back inside, we had good pressure in our sinks, with clear water.
However... I flushed the toilet this morning, and there's clearly not enough water to refill the toilet tank. Some muddy water did come in, but also a lot of air. So... it appears that our big RO tank is empty. (Although there's still water coming out of the sinks, but maybe that's just water that was sitting in the line. I didn't let it run long enough to find out.) I also just went out to look at the well pressure, and it's damn near 0psi. Maybe 1-2psi. The pressure did come back up yesterday when we had the water off to both houses for a couple of hours, but that obviously wasn't long enough to fill our tank. I assume our neighbor and his girlfriend have been sleeping all night, like us, so I can't imagine they've been using a huge amount of water.
Oh, one more wrinkle. My husband noticed yesterday that there were two PVC pipe ends that he apparently cut off with a brush mower last weekend. Once the well pressure got high enough, there was water flowing out of them, which is how he noticed them, but we don't know if they were trickling water all week and emptying our tank, or if the pressure has been so low that no water was coming out of them. So he capped them off again. We think those pipes are coming from the RO filter/tank because the former owner was planning to build a workshop in that area. We thought that might be the source of the water issue, but fixing it hasn't seemed to help anything.
So... I think we have primarily a well problem, namely not enough water in the well thanks to the drought, which may have been exacerbated by the cut PVC pipes and might be resolved if we let it sit for a while without any water use, if there's enough groundwater to slowly refill our well/pressure tank. We also have an empty RO tank which needs to be refilled by our dry well. Any thoughts from someone who's dealt with this sort of thing would be very helpful. Mostly just hoping to figure out whether this is an issue that will resolve with time and rain, or whether we're going to need to pay someone to come out and do something to the system for us. Thank you!