How frequently does this happen? We had to take some rather drastic measures at home to take care of our flooding problem.
Originally posted by: SarcasticDwarf
I never understand why people buy $100,000+ homes with basements and do not spend $500 on a dual sump pump with battery backup. It just does not make any sense to me.
Sometimes that doesn't help. At home, the water would come in through the sump so quickly that the pump couldn't handle it. But that wasn't the only point of entry - it also would come in through every crack in every wall, as well as through those in the floor. The landscapers were apparently rather stupid - the ground slopes toward the house on 3 out of 4 sides.
Every time it would rain heavily for a few consecutive days, or even just enough to completely saturate the ground a few feet down, the water would apparently pool underground in front of the house, as well as in the bed of crushed stone beneath the foundation. The floor of the basement is about 7 feet below the ground level of the front yard, and it seems that the level that the water was trying to fill up to. Fortunately, we could only ever get a few inches before it would get high enough to overflow past the lip of the sliding glass door in the back of the house.
But that still meant about 2" of water throughout the basement. The last time this happened, the flooding started while the rain was still coming down, so we didn't even bother starting to clean up, because the sump not only was having trouble keeping up, and because it was just flowing in everywhere else along the foundation. The pump would run for several seconds and empty out the sump, but it would fill up again within maybe 15 seconds, and the pump would have to run again.
For cleanup, I bought one of
these Shop-vacs. The included hose is a bit wide, and so its removal of water was a bit slow. I got
an adaptor and used the standard 1.25" connectors and floor attachment. That allowed the Shopvac to pull a stronger vacuum, and suck out the water faster. I attached a garden hose to it, and used it to remove the water that way. If you do buy this, note that it is able to suck up water faster than it can expel it, so you've got to suck up some water, then give it time to catch up and push out what it's taken in. But it still was a lot easier than using a unit that needed to be emptied constantly. Even if it's 12 gallons, that's still a tiny amount compared to about 1000 sq feet with 2" of water, which is over 1200 gallons.
Given how long the sump pump would have to run (sometimes a day or more, avg once per minute), I don't know that a battery backup would do the trick, though we do have a generator.
We did have something done though to hopefully take care of this problem for good, though we have yet to get enough rain to test it, and it's been nearly a year.
Someone came in and surveyed the yard, and figured out a plan - he dug a trench around the front and side of the house, which is where the water was coming in from. The trench was close to 10 feet deep, and the majority of it was filled with crushed stone. Over that went a layer of filter fabric, and it was filled with dirt and pressed down. The outlet of the trench is a drainage ditch in between our property and the neighbor's. He also drilled a hole in the frost barrier of the foundation in the back of the house such that it would lead into the crushed stone bed. To this he fitted a large pipe that also led to the drainage ditch.
The trench should serve to intercept any water flowing toward the house and allow it to flow freely around the foundation. Any water near the house should also tend to be wicked toward the trench, as the dirt near it would be slightly drier. The hole to the crushed stone bed will allow any water pooling under the house to flow out through the pipe before it got too full to force its way up through the sump.
That whole thing cost about $5,000. It was one guy in charge with two helpers; he had a backhoe, a dump truck for delivery of 20 tons of crushed stone, and a small variety of tools for cutting through concrete.
Hopefully it will finally work and keep the basement flood-free.
Originally posted by: SarcasticDwarf
The think is, 99+% of homeowners do this. It seems common sense is completely lacking in homeowners. The same thing happened to my parents. Their solution? Replace the sump pump with the same crappy kind and spend $400 on shelving to get everything off the floor.
You can see this in almost any aspect of home improvement/construction too.
We use sections of 2x4's to keep our stuff off the floor, and some of our shelves are homemade.
When we moved into the house, the guy said that he'd never had any problems with flooding. That was probably not a lie - the region was in the midst of a 10 year-long drought. A few years later, it rained for over a week straight, and we had our first flooding. The basement had been carpeted with some ugly stuff, and that all had to be ripped out. That was about 18 years ago. We only finally just did this trenching recently. I guess my parents finally tired of the biyearly flooding, though the cost of the trenching had been a significant deterrent.
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