My only question is was this a sudden failure or had this been a situation taking it's time to trip you up?
Has anyone done any work on the unit, maybe without your knowledge?
I think it was entirely due to gullibility. I took the seller's word at "new well hardware" in which he implied pump as well as the visible stuff. Turned out the visible stuff was all date-coded 2016-17 or was new enough looking to lend credence to that claim. When I got the pump to the surface, its date code was 2004. Seller bought the place in 2005. So the little ****er probably demanded a new well pump (hole was poked in 1984) before buying, then snookered me into thinking he'd done the same when in reality he'd only replaced the pressure tank and control box.
It's been going for a year or two. Occasionally we'd have no water, but wait 2-3 hrs and have water. That is in line with others in the area who say that recharge is VERY SLOW, like <5gpm, and a 3/4 hp pump will do 8gpm or more. Believable that one could drain one's 'pocket' and take time to recharge. Now that I see the age of the pump itself, I wonder if it wasn't a thermal protection in the pump that was activating. Not a pumpsaver, those are separate little doohickeys. Or possibly even just overheating of the pump bearings and they'd bind up and seize the rotor until they cooled off and relaxed. With the truthfulness of the seller now in question, I begin to wonder if he wasn't having the same problem and sweating out the thing continuing to make water til he got paid for the place.
To your next question, no, not since we moved here fulltime in 2020. Between '17 and '20, possible but not likely, as the controls and pressure tank were (before July '23) in a lockable shed which I did padlock when nobody was here. Our place is completely out of sight of the county road, we access through a deeded easement and are behind a heavily-wooded piece of land. The general public has no clue we're back here, so I seriously doubt anyone has made the effort to go see what Fred Sanford's alter-ego (the neighbor over whom we have an easement) might have in his back yard behind the trees.
I will say that five months in, we've had water each and every time we've twisted a faucet. And we can use it reasonably at any rate we can get it to flow, none of this crack the faucet and fill the trough over 4 hours so we don't run the well dry bullcrap. I turned down the solar submersible to where it produces about 3-4 gpm and it's got a pumpsaver on it which has never activated. So, barring something crapping its bed, we have off-grid water at the surface on demand, and I have the parts to have flow in the house on demand without using co-op power.