never again...

Man ive been havin the same damn problem it ruined sheet rock and all... I had about 3in in my basement shit sucks!!!
 
Tacoma747 said:
Will I own a house that needs a sump pump to keep the basement dry. Who's with me?
Came home tonight to 4" of water in the basement (no power).
Click to expand...
Looks like you may have to go to a backup generator. You can set those things up to automatically start when you lose power.
 
back here in ny where everyhouse has a sump pump, most stores sell a battery backup unit. Its more/less similar to a computer UPS unit. Its got a bat + charger and stays charged and can run the pump when power goes out.. Most have alarms on them for low bat.

Also, check out the foundation drainage pipes/gutters etc.. Is there anyway you can run a pipe out to daylight even if its a good distance?
 
ya I also have a sump pump in my house.. but I set my house up to run on backup generator just for this reason.. :)

but a back up battery is a great idea.. thanks mike
 
Never finish a basement that needs a sump pump no matter what the 'back up" is. But then again we(U.S.) "finish" entire cities that need a sump pump to stay above water, so who knows.
 
You're hard pressed in this part of the country to keep a basement or crawl space dry without a sump pump. Newer houses will generally fare better (poured concrete wall, waterproof membrane, drainage plane w/drain tile and gravel, better grading, gutters, etc), but clay just holds so much water... sooner or later it'll get saturated and the water will find a way into the house.

I've done a lot of work to our house to try and keep the crawl space dry (it's basically on grade!), but it's to the point now where after a couple of hard rains, water seeps up from underneath. Burying drain pipes and installing a sump pump is the next step... but fawk trying to dig a ditch under the house.
 
When I lived in MD I lived in the basement of my parents house it had a sump pump and one night I woke up to a down pour and1.5 feet of water in my room . By the time everything was said and done I had to replace my sound system ,bedroom suite and half my clothes we ended up with 3.5 feet of water at the end of the rain .IT SUCKED !!!!
 
i'm with you.. I'll never again own anything with a basement period. Too much trouble. I have about 800-1000 sq ft of useless cellar because of the flooding.

Hell earlier this year when we had all the snow my sump pump gave out and I had 3-4 FEET of water in the cellar!! Never again!
 
Wwildman said:
When I lived in MD I lived in the basement of my parents house it had a sump pump and one night I woke up to a down pour and1.5 feet of water in my room . By the time everything was said and done I had to replace my sound system ,bedroom suite and half my clothes we ended up with 3.5 feet of water at the end of the rain .IT SUCKED !!!!
Click to expand...

Couldn't you just wash your clothes?
 
My parents used to live in PA on the Delaware river. Never had a problem in 50 years. then 3 floods in 2 years. When I say flood I mean 4' of water in the first floor. It's pretty tough talking to your dad on the phone when he is opening windows before the water came up so the water would pass through and not knock the house down.

In retrospect he should have cut all the nieghbors trees down and let them take out the house. Would of been less of a hassle.
 
Wwildman said:
When I lived in MD I lived in the basement of my parents house it had a sump pump and one night I woke up to a down pour and1.5 feet of water in my room . By the time everything was said and done I had to replace my sound system ,bedroom suite and half my clothes we ended up with 3.5 feet of water at the end of the rain .IT SUCKED !!!!
Click to expand...

i'm getting ready to finish off part of my basement - and thsi is my biggest fear!
Biggest problem being that we've only been in teh house 6 months and i don't know yet what the real potential water entrance points are, so I know where to be most defensive. It's the kind of thing you just HAVE to wait and experience and see how bad it is.
 
Dang, you guys have some bad stories! We have a basement in our house too, but we live on a fairly high ridge, and the basement is walk out at the back side. No sump pump, not even a dehumidifier down there. I guess that is due to it being walk out on the back side with a sloped lot.
 
I love a basement because it stays cool without having to A/C it. Part of the basement was somewhat finished when we bought the house, but I have already pulled the carpet out. No big deal, needed to do it anyways. Doesn't look like anything got messed up, could air tools were on the floor but I cleaned them out, and my 4 1/2" grinder, but it worked fine this evening.

I plan to get a generator to take car of this, honestly I can't believe it hasn't happened yet, I've been here for 2 years. Only problem I have had thus far is the sump pump's float stopped working properly.
 
Back
Top