Is Your Basement Sump Pump Ready for the Next Storm?

Reader Contribution by Tim Snyder
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In the Northeast, where I live, many houses have basements and rely on sump pumps to keep the basement dry. The basement sump pump’s job is to pump ground water from a sump pit that extends below the floor. When water reaches a certain level in the sump pit, a float-activated switch turns the sump pump on, and the water is pumped to the exterior.  

I grew up in a house with a basement sump pump and soon learned to appreciate its strengths and limitations as a means of keeping the basement dry. Under normal conditions, the sump pump worked fine and the water stayed below the basement slab floor. But we learned the hard way that sediment and debris could collect in the open sump pit and cause the pump’s intake to clog. So the water level would continue to rise, eventually flooding the basement. Sometimes the pump would burn out from running continuously, adding expense to the aggravation of cleaning up the mess. The other problem we had was an obvious one: A bad storm would knock out our electrical power at the same time it was dumping loads of rain. The sump pump couldn’t operate, so once again the basement would flood.

These memories came back to me recently because of what happened to many houses during Hurricane Sandy. Power lines came down, the water level went up, and plenty of basements flooded. In fact, Sandy identified another problem that can occur with sump pumps. Even in houses that had backup power from generators, quite a few basements flooded because the sump pump got overwhelmed by the volume of water that had to be pumped.

One homeowner I talked to summed up his frustration with a simple statement: “There’s gotta be a better way.”

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