Prevention of Basement Flooding

[Zor]

This year, winter has been dying a long protracted death in Winnipeg. It's something like fifteen degrees below what it usually is this in April and to make it worse we got some fresh snowfall yesterday. Our house has had some problems with flooding in the basement during the big spring melt. To try to prevent this from happening, I have been shoveling aside the snow on the side of the house. Hopefully we won't get any more major snowfall before the snow is all gone. This is the second time i have done this.

It's just frustrating.

Zor

[Alferd Packer]

Scraping the snow away from your house will help, assuming that the ground around your house is graded properly. Otherwise, the best bet remains to install a sump pump in your basement. They ain't cheap, but neither is mold remediation.

[Sea Skimmer]

Yeah get the snow away as much as possible. I have a long experience now mitigating flooding problems at work, and getting water away from the foundation in the first place is the only thing that really works short of massive work for foundation resealing, which is not even an option with certain kinds of rock rubble foundations. Sump pumps are limited help without effective, clean French drains. Otherwise they'll just prevent a deep flood. Good grading helps, but it wont help if the spot water load is already sufficient to cause flooding issues or the soil is good topsoil instead of some nice solid clay.

Some people I know in the area actually just ended up spreading out plastic sheeting several feet wide outside along certain problem sections of foundation wall. It worked, but its not the most ideal solution in the world.

[Zor]

Flooding is not a huge insurmountable problem for us and it has happened before. At most it means a big puddle in one corner of the basement and fortunately there is a drain to get rid of water. What flooding means is moving allot of stuff around and getting the carpet out of harm's way.

Zor

[Meest]

Other than investing in weeping tile or french drain and sump system, keeping things dry inside to prevent mold should be another priority. Have you tried a sealer on the inside basement walls?

[Darksider]

Slightly tangential to Zor's question, does anyone know how much it will cost to get a Sump Pump replaced? Ours literally just died fending off the rain we got today, and now we're going to have to run the hydraulic pump all night to keep the water out.

I've seen estimates online anywhere from 150$ for the pump if you install it yourself, to 2,400$ with a contractor.

[Sea Skimmer]

2,400 dollars sounds excessive even if the contractor had to dig you a new sump in the floor slab.

~150 bucks for a sump pump is reasonable though cheaper ones exist, they are not difficult to install. The main issue is, some sump pumps are fully submersible, and just sit on the bottom of the sump, requiring no real install at all except connecting the outlet hose, which can be very simple (like tighten a hose clamp and your done) or in some cases tricky if you need to change pipe sizes. Measure your outlet pipe before you buy one and see if the new one is gonna support that size pipe, otherwise you'd need some kind of adaptor. Generally in all cases they are plugged in for power, so no wiring work is involved.

Other sump pumps are NOT submersible and must be mounted so that the wiring is above water level, those are a little more tricky as they may need to be screwed down.

If you have no tools and no experience at all you might want to get someone to do it, at which point you may well have to pay at least several hundred dollars just to get someone to show up, unless you know a local handyman as opposed to a formal plumber who is bound to be much cheaper. Plumbers usually wont charge you for less then several hours of work, its just how that job works.

Looks like youtube has many install your own sump pump videos, you might want to look at some and see if it feels over your head or not.

[Darksider]

Yeah I figured it would cost at least five or six hundred dollars to get a plumber out to install anything, and mom and I really aren't "handy" people. My uncle would probably know how to do it, but he's down with a touch of gout right now, so that's out of the question.

Would it be cheaper to buy the pump ourselves from like home depot or some other place and just have the plumber install it, or should we just pay the plumber for everything?

Whatever we end up doing, it's got to be cheaper than running the Hydraulic pump all the time. I can hear the dollar signs forming in the water company's head as I hear all that water rushing through the pipes.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'd buy the pump yourself otherwise at the least the plumber may charge a markup. But you have to make sure you get a usable pump for the location, if your unsure on doing that, well, just use the plumber. A lot of plumbers are nice reasonable people, about all the ones I've ever met were, but some aren't, but in any case they are always expensive because its just a matter of this is not a job you work 8 hours every day at, and you still have to make a living. Also while some jobs are easy like a sump pump, so much plumbing is horrible to do. Best if you can get one with some good reviews or ideally someone you know has used.

I'd sort of suggest for the future, not that a new sump pump should fail quickly, generally they have a several year warranty but easily last a decade plus, that you keep an eye out on the side for a little pump that works with an corded electric drill. They are generally very cheap and move enough water to keep up with reasonable leakage, you just tie or lock the drill trigger down to leave it running. Running that kind of pump should be a lot cheaper then the water turbine driven kind. Though in fairness the whole point of the water driven ones is they will work even when you have a power failure! We had the drill kind as a backup at my old house because our basement would leak awfully bad when we had hurricanes every few years and didn't drain to the sump that well, so the drill would grab water in the far corner from the French drain. But then, yeah, sump pumps ought to last a while so planning for failure isn't too important.

[Sky Captain]

Installing a sump pump is trivial if you already have a sump basin in your basement. Most submersible sump pumps I have seen are simple devices with a power cord to plug in outlet, float that turns the pump on when water level rises and an outlet pipe to connect a hose. Here they usually cost somewhere around 50 - 100 euro. Get one, connect to garden hose, run the hose to drain, put pump in the sump basin and plug in and that's what it takes to install it. A trained monkey could do it.

[Sea Skimmer]

Hmm, a garden hose would make life easier, but every one I've ever seen in the US was designed to connect to a rigid pipe and would need some kind of adaptor for a smaller hose. Code wise I'm pretty sure a garden hose is going to be illegal anywhere here, not that it matters one bit unless you want to sell the house. personally I'm also just hesitant to tell anyone to go do anything themselves over the net they aren't confident about that involves both water and electricity. But then I've also encountered some incredibly bad professional jobs in person. Like how about... a sump pump with the electrical outlet to power it placed inside the sump. Nothing can go wrong with that ever.

[Darksider]

a sump pump with the electrical outlet to power it placed inside the sump. Nothing can go wrong with that ever.

Jesus. That was a professional job?

We already have an outlet that a sump can plug in to, it's wired into the wall a little to the left of the fuse box. Also the problem with the sump wasn't the motor burning out. Apparently the sump has two electrical cords, one which plugs into another, then the combined two plug in to the wall. I was able to get the sump running by not plugging the cords together, and just plugging one of them straight into the wall outlet.

And on top of that, the sump won't turn off when it's running. Whatever mechanism automatically shuts it off when the water sinks below a certain level is not working. We'll probably have to have a plumber come in and look at it.

[Sea Skimmer]

Not only professional, but done as part of a major contractor job in two different sumps for a pair of new outdoor basement access ramps where I work. I'm told by someone that this maybe wasn't code violation, just completely fucking retarded. Low and behold the pumps failed when the outlets corroded to the point parts of one fell into the sump. Also the OTHER part of the job sure was a code violation, when the wiring to the outlets from the building was buried in the ground only a few inches deep and using unarmored cable.

The shutoff mechanism is normally a float on the side. If that is your problem, try lifting and dropping it some, lift it with a stick if need be ect... then pour in a bucket of water to refill the sump and see if it now cycles correctly. They will stick sometimes, and yet go back to working normally for a good while if you poke em. They will however just break or get worn out other times and all you can do realistically is get a new pump. Repair kits exist for some models, its not at all worth the trouble if you could even find one.