Elana
New Member
Hello all,
We moved into this house about 10 months ago. We are located in the Chicago suburbs. Our lot size is not very big and our weather conditions are famously extreme. Our backyard is extremely muddy and soggy throughout the year. Truthfully, most of the mud (along with an intermittent "pond") is in our rear neighbor's yard, as they are downhill from us, but we still get a fair share of mud near our shared fence line. This is largely due to our sump pump. It runs every 10 minutes (now that we have it set to 13" before discharging, which is as high as we can set it without the water going above the inlet pipe). It takes less than 2 minutes for the basin to fill to 6". The basin is 24" in diameter and I think it is about 25-30" deep, though I haven't measured that.
Different experts have proposed different solutions. One suggested a French drain that would span across our whole yard, in hopes of "capturing" the water on the way down the hill. Our plumber, however, said that the water would remain trapped in our yard that way and just continue to be recycled by the sump pump. He suggested re-routing the discharge pipe to the front of the house. This is unsightly, but we gave it a try... however, so much water was being pumped out front, onto the sidewalk, into the street, that we actually had a neighbor ring our bell at 9:30 at night, telling us he thought we had a burst water main.
There are numerous small holes drilled into the sides of the sump basin. It seems like all that water is coming from those holes. I never see water coming in from the inlet pipe. I worry that my sump pump is acting more like a well, pumping water from deep underground (well below our basement slab) and moving it to the top of our lawn. I wonder if it would be prudent to cover the holes somehow, or replace the basin entirely, though that may be cost prohibitive.
Our next door neighbor tells us that there didn't used to be a sump pump in our basement, but it flooded once over the course of 5 years, and so the DIYer who lived here before us installed the pump. A flood once after 5 years with no pump doesn't sound to me like the water table should be so excessively high that the pump needs to run all of the time.
There are no storm drains near our house. The nearest one is several houses down the block, at the corner. Per village code, we are not allowed to extend discharge pipes more than 5 ft from our foundation line (which I understand is undersized, according to best practices). We are also not allowed to bury the discharge pipes, though I might be willing to bend that rule in my own backyard, to hitch it to a French drain, if that would solve the problem. Issue is, a French drain is very expensive, and I'd hate to spend the money if it won't help, as my plumber suggests it will be useless. If my village were more reasonable (they are not), I might request special permission to hitch up to the sanitary sewer line, which is also not allowed.
What is our best course of action to solve this problem? Is there any more information I can provide? Thanks in advance for your assistance. We are at our wits' end with this and desperately want to solve the problem. Our immediate neighbors don't seem to have this issue, and we are not positioned at the bottom of a hill or anything like that.
We moved into this house about 10 months ago. We are located in the Chicago suburbs. Our lot size is not very big and our weather conditions are famously extreme. Our backyard is extremely muddy and soggy throughout the year. Truthfully, most of the mud (along with an intermittent "pond") is in our rear neighbor's yard, as they are downhill from us, but we still get a fair share of mud near our shared fence line. This is largely due to our sump pump. It runs every 10 minutes (now that we have it set to 13" before discharging, which is as high as we can set it without the water going above the inlet pipe). It takes less than 2 minutes for the basin to fill to 6". The basin is 24" in diameter and I think it is about 25-30" deep, though I haven't measured that.
Different experts have proposed different solutions. One suggested a French drain that would span across our whole yard, in hopes of "capturing" the water on the way down the hill. Our plumber, however, said that the water would remain trapped in our yard that way and just continue to be recycled by the sump pump. He suggested re-routing the discharge pipe to the front of the house. This is unsightly, but we gave it a try... however, so much water was being pumped out front, onto the sidewalk, into the street, that we actually had a neighbor ring our bell at 9:30 at night, telling us he thought we had a burst water main.
There are numerous small holes drilled into the sides of the sump basin. It seems like all that water is coming from those holes. I never see water coming in from the inlet pipe. I worry that my sump pump is acting more like a well, pumping water from deep underground (well below our basement slab) and moving it to the top of our lawn. I wonder if it would be prudent to cover the holes somehow, or replace the basin entirely, though that may be cost prohibitive.
Our next door neighbor tells us that there didn't used to be a sump pump in our basement, but it flooded once over the course of 5 years, and so the DIYer who lived here before us installed the pump. A flood once after 5 years with no pump doesn't sound to me like the water table should be so excessively high that the pump needs to run all of the time.
There are no storm drains near our house. The nearest one is several houses down the block, at the corner. Per village code, we are not allowed to extend discharge pipes more than 5 ft from our foundation line (which I understand is undersized, according to best practices). We are also not allowed to bury the discharge pipes, though I might be willing to bend that rule in my own backyard, to hitch it to a French drain, if that would solve the problem. Issue is, a French drain is very expensive, and I'd hate to spend the money if it won't help, as my plumber suggests it will be useless. If my village were more reasonable (they are not), I might request special permission to hitch up to the sanitary sewer line, which is also not allowed.
What is our best course of action to solve this problem? Is there any more information I can provide? Thanks in advance for your assistance. We are at our wits' end with this and desperately want to solve the problem. Our immediate neighbors don't seem to have this issue, and we are not positioned at the bottom of a hill or anything like that.