When I was in the Navy, one of the mainstays of our damage control training was using Peri-jet eductors to dewater spaces. As you can probably imagine, getting water out of your ship as quickly as possible has benefits...in combat situations, your ship is generally your only way home. Imagine my surprise yesterday at being called on to put that training to use.
Between 11:15 pm Sunday evening and 1:40 am Monday morning, the WBL area received just under 4" of rain. It seems that all of it fell on my house.
I believe I've described my property before, but if not (for brevity sake), I'll just say that the water table in the neighborhood is extremely high, the soil clay does not drain quickly, and having a home with an old, cracked basement foundation (for purposes of this post, you slab/crawl-spacers can bite me) at the base of a hill is a recipe for disaster.
Drain tile and sump pump you say? I've got 'em ... in spades. I have ~80% of the footprint drain tiled leading to four sump pumps (three 1/2-3/4 hp and one 1/4 hp "emergency" pump with a battery back-up) in three sump basins, with two separate discharge lines. Unfortunately, one of those sump basins functions as a pour over, pumping the tile from the western/southern side of the house to a basin eastern side where a lifter pump connected to the discharge is at.*
Q: What happens when you get that lovely combination of torrential rain, clay soil, hillside and - aghast - a malfunctioning sump pump, even in a system with three other functioning pumps?
A: You get a partially flooded basement.
My wife found it at 7:30 am when she went down to the freezer to get milk for Niblet's daycare bottles. It looked like a basin had overflowed. Previous water in the basement had been in a different location, so this was unsettling. I spent the next four hours moving stuff to the dry part of the basement, a tarp & plastic triage space in the living room, the front walkway or (fortunately/unfortunately) the 55-gallon garbage can (now full).
I was then able to access the offending sump and found that, indeed, the pump had decided to sh!t the bed.** With light rain, the basin would have drained via gravity, though the discharge line is so high in the setup that that's far from ideal. Heavy rain and no pumping action? Yeah ... water .... lots and lots of water. At first, I attempted to use a 5 gallon shop vac to empty the basin, but 30 gallons in, the basin was still refilling as quickly as I could fill the vacuum.
I called the local rental place and reserved a little puddle sucker submersible pump - the last pump of any kind that they had in stock. I ran over to pick it up and brought it home. I dropped it into the offending basin, ran the 2" discharge hose to the basin with two functional discharge pumps (main & backup), and turned the portable on. It ran, continuously, for the next 3 hours. The pump is rated at 60 gallons per minute max and I’m sure that it did that volume for the first 40 minutes. When the inflow to the basin slowed a bit, the pump intake wasn’t fully submerged, but even 30-50% of that discharge was still flowing without interruption until I got back from the big box store with a new sump pump. The old pump was only 1/4 HP because it isn't pumping 'up' so much as 'over' but I went a little larger (1/3 HP) because why wouldn't you?***
Pulled the old sump pump out (corroded hose clamps were fortuitously not too corroded) and then removed the old check valve and discharge assembly. It seemed to be in good shape (the whole pump did actually, though obviously you can't see a damaged float sensor) but the discharge connection on the old assembly line was a female fitting and the new pump needed male. Ran to the local hardware store for new hose clamps, a 2” x 4” steel nipple - threaded at both ends, and some plumbers tape.
Put the discharge assembly together with the new connection and connected it to the new pump. Measured the height from the bottom of the basin to the midpoint on the discharge line and set the discharge to that height. New pump went into the basin and, thankfully my measurements were on, the rubber neck lined right up with the PCV discharge line. Tightened up the hose clamp, plugged the sucker in and waited about 30 seconds for the basin to fill. Kicked on, pumped over to the larger sump basin and that pump kicked on and sent the water outside. There was much rejoicing.
Other than a break to get the kiddos dinner and to bed, I spent the next 9 hours with the shop vac, sucking water out of the carpet and placing fans and a dehumidifier. All told, I can say with confidence that I moved at least 7,000 gallons of water yesterday. I will be certain to test my sumps every spring and fall from here on out; hopefully I can locate a bad one before it bites me in the @ss like this one did.
*Due to the garage and road placement, there is nowhere to discharge water on the northwest, west, southwest, south & southeastern sides of the home.
**Apparently, some pumps have a thermal overload protection. When the sump pump short-cycles (for instance, a small pit fills up with water very quickly and the sump pump has to turn on and off frequently) its thermal overload protection kicks in and shuts the pump down – the basement floods even though the sump pump is not broken and will return back to normal after it cools down. I haven't figured out yet if this is the case. If it is, I now have a back-up on standby and may just turn it into a portable submersible pump.
***I didn't do any research on what pump to purchase due to emergency nature and time constraints. I went with a Ridgid 1/3 HP Model # 330RSU as I've used some of their other tools and have been happy with the results. I see now that the brand is only averaging 3/5 stars on nearly 200 reviews at the big box retailer and has similarly disturbing reviews (2.3/5) on Amazon...sigh. I guess I can either return it and get something with better reviews or hope that I got a good one and because it's not working as hard (pumping over, not up) it'll last.
Anyone have thoughts on veracity/accuracy of online review scores?
I am constantly impressed by how little I know compared to the Nation. I can't say I enjoyed reading about your misfortune, but I... enjoyed... that you wrote about it? Best of luck with the cleanup. The home I grew up in flooded about every other year, sometimes more, and it was always a lot of work.
Thanks - it's a pain for sure, but I'm happy that I know what I'm doing. Well, happy isn't exactly the right sentiment ...
Fwiw, our first house, in Chambana, had a basement, and a sump pump installed in a hole in the basement floor (tied into the sanitary system, contrary to code, so we had to fix). Pro tip: if your basement floor has a hole in it with a pump installed in it, there's probably a reason.
Also, our small lot was a couple feet lower than the lots to either side. So their runoff ran...to our basement.
Dumbasses who owned previously had not installed the sump intelligently. When it ran the first time, it vibrated so much it managed to pull its plug out of the outlet. Yea, seriously. And the water nly got pumped a couple feet away from the house, where it just came back in, rather than being routed to the street and the storm drains. Oy.
So, good luck, man.
Thanks - the system in the basement was installed by professionals so I believe it's probably as good as can be. Nothing to be done for a pump that craps out which, of course, I didn't notice because I have not tested the pumps this year (not two of them anyway). It's something I'll be doing twice a year from now on.
My basement had a hole with a sump pump. I'm not 100% certain its needed because we're on a hill with the yard along sloping away from the house on all sides. I'd rather not find out for certain, though.
It drains right out into the backyard though, which produced a big hole in the ground. I filled it with a big ass boulder I pulled out of my yard when I built the fence.
Hmmm... I've got a Ridgid Drill/Flashlight set*, a Ridgid Shop Vac, and a Ridgid Miter Saw. I like them all. My Brother-in-law, the one that basically building a cabin in the woods all by himself**, swears by the brand. I'm surprised that their sump pumps have such low ratings.
I wonder what brand of Sump Pump we have. (The only time it's ever been used was when we were inspecting the house. Water's been a problem, including in the basement, but not from outside.)
Because we don't regularly go to the basement, I also installed a sump alarm. That's never gone off except when testing.
*It seems like an absurd pairing, but man do I love that flashlight. I recently learned that they no longer make the flashlight, and I was bummed. Now I have to be careful with mine.
**I've put in one day of sweat equity, probably another this fall.
I used to work for Emerson Electric; you need a Ridgid calendar.
The FIL worked for Emerson for 20+ years.
I was surprised at the low ratings too because, like you, I'd been happy with the tools of theirs I've used.
I'm a little hesitant to put all that much stock in such ratings. If there are comments, I'll read them, but ratings can be unreliable.
As always, xkcd has a great guide to understanding star ratings.
I thought so too, but many of the ratings are substantiated with comments, and when the sample size is >500 ratings over multiple platforms & marketplaces, I have to give the results some credence. Still not sure if I'm going to replace the unit ... it was pretty easy to install.
I always read the most negative comments because most of the time the issues those people are having are because they are really dumb. Is easy to tell if the product works from those type of comments. It's also pretty easy to tell if the problems are legitimate from those one star reviews as well.
Right, like reviews that say it didn't do thing X, when really you should have something else to do thing X, this is really for thing Y.
IIRC, the reviews make it sound like the switch on the Ridgid pump was questionable. I know from experience that this can be a tricky thing. (The pump in our new house worked when the inspector tested it and then not again when we tested it due to all the unrelated water issues. After contacting the inspector, we were able to get it working about one time out of ten. The inspector made it right on that and the mostly but not entirely hidden water issues.)
7,000 gallons of water is nuts. We don't have a sump pump and all of our basement flooding has been a result of the internal variety. Nasty.
The only internal flooding we've had so far is the result of leaving the faucet on while rinsing chlorine from swimming suits (suits plugged the sink overflow). Peanuts compared to yesterday. That being said, I'm glad I got the portable pump in time or a larger portion of the 7k gallons would likely have been wading water v. standing water...it was all in the drain tile or oversaturated ground against the foundation/basement walls.
Holy crap, that is a lot of sump pumps. If it was me, I think I might have tried to pump that water into some buckets to use in brewing, save a little money.
I take it you purchase water for brewing then?
I already have water from the ground that I don't pay anything for (except electricity for the pump). I live approximately 8 miles from downtown St. Paul, but through a quirk of local government,* I have both a well and a septic system.
*Rich people used to own this property, ran the estates hereabouts as a stand-alone community and then fought annexation by White Bear Lake in the '50's (I believe) by creating an actual city. Of the <400 who call it home, maybe 3-dozen families still don't have city services. We're one of those.
More or less. Every three months I get a bill from the city for water and sewage. When I cool the wort, I swear the water looks green...
That is horrifying! Thank goodness you knew what to do, and here's hoping you never encounter this particular situation again.
One nice thing about our house is that it is on a hill and the soil is very sandy. Also, our house is up from the street so that the basement floor is about a foot below street level. We have a sump hole, but no pump.
The neighbor across the street said that the first year he lived there there was about a 10" rainfall and no one in the area got water in their basement. The City of Minneapolis will probably be completely flooded before I get water in my basement.
Sorry to hear about your mess.
Thanks.