BlkSC
New Member
Hello all, first time poster but I've read more threads here than I can count...and that has led me to analysis paralysis. A lot of this may be useless info but I want to paint the best picture I can in hopes of getting the best answer. First bit of useless information, I'm an electrician by trade and plumbing isn't high on my list of things I like to do...electricity gets loose and it (should) trip a breaker...water gets loose...f-ed.
In 2016, I bought a house that was built in 1999. For approximately 2 years before I bought it, the house was foreclosed on and sat vacant. Of course, because there was no power, the finished basement got water in it...but the bank paid someone to remove all the carpet and replace the bottom four feet of the sheetrock throughout before they put it up for sale. From the few things that weren't replaced (the bathroom vanity), it doesn't look like the water got more than a couple inches high.
Before I even moved in, I bought a Zoeller M82 pedestal sump pump as I was just certain I'd find the installed sump pump (1/3hp Wayne pedestal pump, 18"x24" sump, 1.5" discharge that travels up 5.5', 5' horizontally outside and down underground all the way out to the curb, I'd guess 100'...maybe 150') dead. To my surprise it worked...and has continued to work since I moved in. So I figured I'd just keep the new sump pump as a spare. For the first couple years, the sump pump rarely ran, only when it would rain fairly heavy for a longer period of time and never runs in the winter or middle of summer.
In 2019, we got torrential downpours that ended up flooding part of the town, what many would say was a 100 year flood. So bad that I left my house for a callout driving my normal route over the spill way south of the lake and when I attempted to get home just an hour later, going that same way was impassible. Come to find out, my neighborhood can become an island when it floods. I was very accustomed to slow floods growing up, this was my first experience with a flash flood. About an hour later, I found a way to get back to my house (despite the fact I made it home, I'll never do what I did to get home again). My sump pump was running non-stop and the motor was so hot I couldn't touch it. Without shutting off, the float would come up, start going back down and just before it would shut off, the float would just stop and slowly start coming back up. I later had an epiphany that the suction of the sump is on the top, the water was rushing in so fast that it was causing the pump to cavitate. I tested this later by deflecting the incoming water with a hamper lid, worked like a charm. When it's really bad, the sump pump runs approximately 20 seconds, is off for 40 seconds, then comes back on, etc...and this was after I adjusted it to come on when the water level almost gets up to the single incoming drain tile.
This may be more worthless info but here goes. I was at work and it was raining pretty good most of the day, enough that when I got home I expected to hear my sump pump running. I was home for a few minutes and hadn't heard it so I investigated. The float was stuck...but the water was still about three inches from escaping from the sump. I unstuck the float and it ran off and on for a few hours before the drain tile was empty (this is when I did the hamper lid cavitation experiment). It makes me think that, if the sump pump were to die while I'm home, I'd have some time to change it out before the sump overflowed...but in the back of my mind I think this may just be a false sense of security.
My gutters are a couple years old, they go out several feet to good slope away from my house but...my backyard slopes towards my house. This summer, I plan on having a concrete patio poured, about 15 feet wide and the entire length of my house, with a sidewalk along the south of my house to the driveway. The slope of the patio will be such that it directs the water around my house to where I have good slope away. This may completely alleviate my sump pump "issues"...but, again, in the back of my mind, I can't help but wonder if the water table just comes up that high when it rains hard. If it helps, I'll attempt to draw a picture and attach it but my front yard slopes around 12 ft down to the road, then the house across the street is at the road level and their backyard then slopes down quite a lot as it runs out. Is it even possible for my water table to be higher than the house across the street?
I want to replace the sump pump. The neighborhood has lost power maybe a dozen times in the last six years, maybe two times for a couple hours (one of those times was the Big Freeze we experienced in February 2021), it's usually just a blip and it's never done it when my sump pump needed to run. But I'd really like to plan for more of a worse case scenario. I was about to pull the trigger on this:
Ion alternating sump pump with inverter battery backup
but then had the thought...two submersible pumps are going to take up quite a bit of my sump volume. It's approximately 15" from the bottom of my sump to the bottom of the drain tile, that's roughly 16.5 gallons. Minus the few inches in the bottom that's always left and the volume taken up by the pumps, I just wonder if this will lead to worse short cycling issues.
If you made it through all of this, what are your thoughts? Other than my obvious overthinking...lol
In 2016, I bought a house that was built in 1999. For approximately 2 years before I bought it, the house was foreclosed on and sat vacant. Of course, because there was no power, the finished basement got water in it...but the bank paid someone to remove all the carpet and replace the bottom four feet of the sheetrock throughout before they put it up for sale. From the few things that weren't replaced (the bathroom vanity), it doesn't look like the water got more than a couple inches high.
Before I even moved in, I bought a Zoeller M82 pedestal sump pump as I was just certain I'd find the installed sump pump (1/3hp Wayne pedestal pump, 18"x24" sump, 1.5" discharge that travels up 5.5', 5' horizontally outside and down underground all the way out to the curb, I'd guess 100'...maybe 150') dead. To my surprise it worked...and has continued to work since I moved in. So I figured I'd just keep the new sump pump as a spare. For the first couple years, the sump pump rarely ran, only when it would rain fairly heavy for a longer period of time and never runs in the winter or middle of summer.
In 2019, we got torrential downpours that ended up flooding part of the town, what many would say was a 100 year flood. So bad that I left my house for a callout driving my normal route over the spill way south of the lake and when I attempted to get home just an hour later, going that same way was impassible. Come to find out, my neighborhood can become an island when it floods. I was very accustomed to slow floods growing up, this was my first experience with a flash flood. About an hour later, I found a way to get back to my house (despite the fact I made it home, I'll never do what I did to get home again). My sump pump was running non-stop and the motor was so hot I couldn't touch it. Without shutting off, the float would come up, start going back down and just before it would shut off, the float would just stop and slowly start coming back up. I later had an epiphany that the suction of the sump is on the top, the water was rushing in so fast that it was causing the pump to cavitate. I tested this later by deflecting the incoming water with a hamper lid, worked like a charm. When it's really bad, the sump pump runs approximately 20 seconds, is off for 40 seconds, then comes back on, etc...and this was after I adjusted it to come on when the water level almost gets up to the single incoming drain tile.
This may be more worthless info but here goes. I was at work and it was raining pretty good most of the day, enough that when I got home I expected to hear my sump pump running. I was home for a few minutes and hadn't heard it so I investigated. The float was stuck...but the water was still about three inches from escaping from the sump. I unstuck the float and it ran off and on for a few hours before the drain tile was empty (this is when I did the hamper lid cavitation experiment). It makes me think that, if the sump pump were to die while I'm home, I'd have some time to change it out before the sump overflowed...but in the back of my mind I think this may just be a false sense of security.
My gutters are a couple years old, they go out several feet to good slope away from my house but...my backyard slopes towards my house. This summer, I plan on having a concrete patio poured, about 15 feet wide and the entire length of my house, with a sidewalk along the south of my house to the driveway. The slope of the patio will be such that it directs the water around my house to where I have good slope away. This may completely alleviate my sump pump "issues"...but, again, in the back of my mind, I can't help but wonder if the water table just comes up that high when it rains hard. If it helps, I'll attempt to draw a picture and attach it but my front yard slopes around 12 ft down to the road, then the house across the street is at the road level and their backyard then slopes down quite a lot as it runs out. Is it even possible for my water table to be higher than the house across the street?
I want to replace the sump pump. The neighborhood has lost power maybe a dozen times in the last six years, maybe two times for a couple hours (one of those times was the Big Freeze we experienced in February 2021), it's usually just a blip and it's never done it when my sump pump needed to run. But I'd really like to plan for more of a worse case scenario. I was about to pull the trigger on this:
Ion alternating sump pump with inverter battery backup
but then had the thought...two submersible pumps are going to take up quite a bit of my sump volume. It's approximately 15" from the bottom of my sump to the bottom of the drain tile, that's roughly 16.5 gallons. Minus the few inches in the bottom that's always left and the volume taken up by the pumps, I just wonder if this will lead to worse short cycling issues.
If you made it through all of this, what are your thoughts? Other than my obvious overthinking...lol