After dinner tonight my father told me he had a job in the basement for me. My mother said he was drilling something down there so I figured it was a shelf or new workbench he bought on the way home or something. Well I was wrong. I came down and turned the corner and saw the post hole digger, figured that wasn’t used for a shelf. First some back story.
Last year was the first time ever that the water table actually came above the basement floor and into a few low spots in the basement. It was after a four day non-stop heavy rain storm that really flooded many areas. I remember the nice wake up call of my mother yelling to get out of the bed the basement was flooding. I rushed downstairs thinking there was a few inches of water to find medium sized puddles around the basement. I called my father to see if he had any suggestions since the wet-vac I had could only fight so much, I would have been there all day turning it on a off, you just can’t beat mother nature sometimes. He told me he had a sump pump sitting in a box somewhere. I scrambled to find the hose and get it all hooked up and threw it in a low spot that was large enough to cover the bottom half of the pump so it would work and not overheat. That allowed us to gain control of the water until it stopped raining later on that evening.
Ever since then, we have talked about digging the hole to install the sump pump and discussed where it should go. I guess since it has been raining on and off for the past week the idea popped back into his head. While I was still at work he drilled some holes and busted out the concrete to make an 18 inch hole. When I came down I helped by digging out the dirt, got about 7-9 inches down and we hit a snag. Apparently there is an entire slab under the first slab…go figure. Everything in this house was built very strangely by previous owners, I don’t think they knew what they were doing at all with all the uneven floors and crooked walls. So the project for tomorrow is to drill through slab number two and dig some more. Can’t friggin’ believe there’s another slab. My theory is hopefully there was no sewer piping when the house was built in the 1920’s so they laid down the pipes and just poured a new slab over the old one, otherwise I am really baffled.
For the type of system we’re putting in we need to go down 22 inches. This 18 x 22 inch hole will fit the basin that sump pump will go into. From there we just go straight out the wall to the left for the drain pipe, only about 3-4 feet away. It’s not a very large system at all because we really don’t get any flooding. Our main use of the system will be to keep the table lower below the basement floor to improve dampness. The basement is very damp and we need to run a dehumidifier constantly throughout the summer. The electricity cost from that thing for two months is more than the refrigerator for almost the whole year.
I’ll post more and maybe grab the manufacturer and model of the sump pump tomorrow when we continue the project. Right now I don’t even know where it is. If you want to read more on sump pumps and how they work, here is the Wikipedia article.
On a side note but related, my friend Paul over at the Homeowner’s blog has an excellent dry basement system that he had installed last year. If you flood often you should read his posts and consider this system, he hasn’t had any flooding since! Read them in order and enjoy!
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/fixing-the-basement-drainage-problems
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/basement-contractors
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/the-basement-water-proofing-prep-work
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/how-to-water-proof-a-basement-from-the-inside-out-part-i
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/how-to-water-proof-a-basement-part-ii
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/basement-wet-or-basement-dry
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/putting-the-american-dry-basement-system-to-the-test
http://www.catskillhouse.us/blog/basement-not-flooding
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