As you may have heard, California has gotten an inordinate amount of rain this winter. Which is mostly a good thing, but it’s caused a problem for my mother: her basement fills with water, 6" - 8" deep, when it rains. (This has been a known condition for decades whenever there is an extraordinarily wet winter – which has not happened for several years).
She has a sump pump to get the water out; but this means that my sister comes over, checks the basement, turns on the pumps (and possibly supplements it with manual bailing) to ensure that the water doesn’t rise high enough to flood the water heater.
My mother is 91 and sister is 72, by the way. They shouldn’t be doing this stuff. (And I Ilve 250 miles away).
There are no plumbing leaks, and the water isn’t coming from any blocked drains or creek runoff…it must be the water table rising up and seeping through the basement floor.
So how do we stop it? First … what kind of professional does one call in to assess this problem? Not a plumber, I assume… And if there’s no way to stop the water coming in, is there a way to automate the pumping process?
(Of course as soon as we solve the problem the drought will return…)
The sump pump should have a float switch so it is automated and won’t need to be turned on and the water won’t get so high. That is a fairly simple and inexpensive fix.
Stopping the water from coming in is a major project typically involving landscaping, french drains and the like. It can get quite expensive, like $30-40,000 expensive. I know from looking into quite a bit when it was about $20-25,000 to do it.
But just getting the sump pump automated is huge and cheap.
Does the basement have one sump or 2? 2 is almost always better.
A conversation with my sister reveals that her pumps do not have float switches. She’s on her way to Home Depot to rectify that situation, so: problem solved, or at least abated. Thanks!
Depending on how the water gets in - a simple project like making a bank of earth around the house should help. A wheel-barrow full every 3 feet would create a small rise - 6 inches or more high, foot wide - just before the exterior wall at the low spots. Usually what happens is water pools against the house and down the foundation, either overloading the weeping tile or finding cracks in the foundation. If it’s like my old house, built decades ago - the hole for the basement was filled in around, but the loose fill has compacted over the years creating actually a downhill to the basement walls. Making the area around the house uphill by a foot or less is all that’s needed to slow the flow. Then instead of flooding in, most of the water will flow away before it soaks its way in.
When I bought a house back in the mid-80s it had a flooding problem almost every time there wasa heavy rainfall… I had three companies come out to see what could be done, and got three wildly different solutions. The most radical was to have the brick foundation completely replaced, which would have meant having the house jacked up and a concrete foundation installed. Another proposal was to have the foundation sealed from the outside, which meant having a trench dug completely around the house. The third solution was to have a drainage system installed to direct the water which was seeping through the foundation to a pit where a sump pump would clear it out. All of these would have been expensive, so I decided to take some time to think it over.
In the meantime I decided to get the back porch replaced before it collapsed. The contractor I hired to do this pointed out that my gutters also needed to be replaced, and he would give me a discount to do both jobs. Afterwards, I noticed that there was no flooding after the next heavy rain. Apparently what had been happening was instead of the rainwater going down the leaky gutters it was running through the exterior walls and into my basement. I was really glad I hadn’t spent all the money to get the foundation fixed.
Yes. The most important step is direct the flow during the downpour away from the walls of the house. This should significantly limit the level of water accumulation in thee basement, and is easy to do (usually). Then see if there are additional steps that need to be taken.
We had a very similar experience. Only, in my case, one of the contractors – the one with the highest bid and most surefire solution – told us we should try fixing the gutters first. We had the gutters replaced, with proper slope and discharging away from the house, and it has only leaked once after that. On that occasion, there was so much rain that trees were falling over from soil liquefaction, and the water was coming into the basement along the outside of our water supply pipe, which enters through the basement wall.
I remember being a little annoyed that none of the foundation experts pointed out the possibility that the water in my basement could have been from leaky gutters instead of through the foundation itself. Admittedly, the house was old and the inside basement walls had a lot of efflorescence which would have been caused by leaching. Still, they were obviously more interested in selling me their preferred solution than actually solving my problem.
With my house, the water was coming in through the foundation/basement walls, not down from above, but the pressure was building up from water accumulating around the foundation. Directing all the water that falls on the roof away from the foundation is what fixed it for us.
I also repaired a big crack in one wall, but the water would have kept coming in if not for the new gutters.
Not quite a flooding basement, but I had a crawl space that was accumulating water to a depth of several inches. After some investigation, I found that the builder had punched through the foundation blocks to bring in the power cable for my carriage lamp near the driveway. They made two holes. The first one was too high and was barely below the final outside grade. They moved it down about 12 inches, brought in the cable, and then sealed it. They never sealed the first hole they made. Water would come through that hole like the sea coming through a hole in a dike. I sealed the unused hole on the outside with some masonry/asphalt sealer and then filled the hole itself with expanding sealer from the inside. Problem solved.
I’ve learned recently that some houses don’t even have gutters. Does your mom’s house have gutters?
The basement in my house was leaky before I bought it. One thing that the previous owners did was run the downspouts into the ground, to pipes that lead to the ditch near the street. Due to that and the straight up waterproofing they did at the foundation, my basement has been dry (except when the sump pump dies and the backup dies too but that’s another discussion).
I investigate a lot of homes with this problem, but in Alberta, so a very different climate. I did not even know sump pumps without floats existed, I suspect a very old design. Good first step to address, glad she found that solution.
Everyone up thread who mentioned grading, redirecting down spouts etc is on the right track. The first course of action is to make sure precipitation goes away from the home rather than seeping into the ground. Basements will never be watertight, and even ships need bilge pumps. If the ground outside is saturated, water is going to find its way in.
The water can be coming from a number of sources. Adjacent properties with drainage towards yours, leaking water mains or services, seasonal sub grade ground water flow.
If the issue is recent it is worth calling the municipality and seeing if they will check the mains and service for leaks. Leaks in water service lines in older properties are very common. They can leak suddenly and catastrophically, and slowly over long term. Not a cheap fix.
Seasonal ground water can be the hardest. Subterranean water courses can change, and properties with no previous issue can suddenly have a issue. This one is very difficult, possibly hopeless, to mitigate.