I can only assume my house has shifted in the last 50 years, because it seems to me the usual thing in a room with a drain is to have the drain at the lowest point, so that any water runs into it.
That is not the case with my basement drain. In fact, when it backed up (which it’s done twice), water (i.e. sewage) went everywhere but back in the drain.
This couldn’t possibly be a design flaw. I guess it could be a mistake, though.
What I’m wondering is, how much trouble would it be to fix it? Repour the whole basement? Or just build up the concrete floor in the single room downstairs that has the drain?
In case anyone was wondering, there is NO WAY I’m doing this myself, but I’d like to have some idea of how bad it could get before I start calling contractors. My fear is that anyone hired will uncover something really bad in the basement–some super-expensive structural thing that will require immediate fixing and a second mortgage, or will keep us from putting the house on the market at some point in the near future.
So is it really that bad? Anyone else had this problem in a '50s-era house?
Questions.
Does the floor slope to the drain,or is it just anywhere in the floor? (Refering to your comment about water everywhere but).
Does the floor flood with some regularity,either a hydrostatic condition or inability to rid stormwater?
Are you on a municipal system or private septic?
The drain is a little bit off center, and the floor slopes (rather irregularly) toward one inside wall on the north and one outside wall on the south. Water that happens to land on the west side heads toward the west wall and then follows the wall to the north, where it forms a puddle and gradually seeps into the drywall.
Regularity? It’s a tree root thing, usually–about every four years. However, there are two concrete sinks there, and right now one of them is plugged, so it overflowed. It would have been closer for the water to flow right down that drain, but no…it took the route of gravity, and I had to come and sweep it into the drain. It’s very annoying.
It’s also the laundry room, so there is the potential for overflowing washer. That hasn’t happened in a long time.
(Also at one point we had the cats’ litter boxes in here, on the theory we could clear out the litter and then, if necessary, just hose the room down when necessary. No such luck.)
Municipal system. One backup was caused by something they were doing to the city water pipes, and the city fixed it. Still, there wouldn’t have been so much damage if the drain worked like a drain.
I’m not actually sure if anything has changed. It doesn’t look like it could have changed. But it’s the sort of thing we only notice when there’s water (or icky stuff) in that room, and all the times the sewer’s backed up, it was because the drain itself was clogged, so nothing was going down it. But this time the water came from elsewhere, and should have gone down the drain, but didn’t.
So, yeah…we’ve lived here 13 years and unless the lower half of the house has tilted, which I guess is possible, it must have always been this way. We are not, as far as I know, in an area where there’s expanding soil (it has been a problem in some parts of the city).
ETA: when it was full of sewage we didn’t look at it closely, and those times somebody else did the cleanup, coming in with power washers and fans and stuff, paid for by insurance the first time and inexplicably not the second time. This time it was clean water, or at least compared to the sewer stuff, so we could see where it was going.
If the water didn’t go down the drain, and if the concrete slopes toward the drain, then the drain was clogged. It doesn’t take much to slow down a drain, especially if there’s been lots of rain, or if a tile is cracked.
My Roto-Rooter guy (Dave, we’re on first-name basis now) says if we could see what our drains look like, we’d have them cleaned regularly. But we don’t see them, so we let them go until they get clogged, and then there’s a bigger mess to deal with.
But maybe that’s just Dave, trying to make a living.
I guess I am explaining this badly: The concrete doesn’t slope toward the drain.
In a couple of instances the drain clogged. At that time, due to the fact that the drain was clogged and there was a couple of inches of sewage on the floor of the room, we did not notice that the concrete didn’t slope toward the drain. In fact the sewage came up through the drain. We might have noticed when cleaning up, but the people who cleaned out the pipes also cleaned up, so we didn’t.
This time there was not that much water, and it did go down the drain, once I swept it over there from the rest of the room.
What I’m wondering is how much it would be to fix it so the concrete does slope toward the drain.
Foundations and footings CAN and do fail…It sounds like your footings have sunk a touch and the outside walls have dropped a few inches…I am NOT a home inspector or contractor, but i have seen it happen…
You can level and slope a poured foundation but it ain’t lways cheap…
It’s really hard to give you a possible fix w/o seeing the situation. One less expensive solution might be to install a sump pump in the low corner of the room. It’s a small open pit w/ an electric pump, operated by a float switch. They even make a backup operated by water pressure, in case the power goes off and no ones home. The pumps discharge is then piped into the existing drainage system. If you chose this, you could plug the existing floor drain to prevent future backup.
Building up the existing floor, to make the drain the low point, might be possible, but it’s probably best to redo the whole floor. That means breaking up the existing floor (I assume it’s concrete) and repouring it, after making any necessary repairs to the existing drain pipe.
There is a new system that can reline existing drain pipes w/ an epoxy coating, (uses air pressure and flexible sleeves) making the pipe impervious to root intrusion, no joints, no roots, but that won’t solve the slope problem.
You can always get a couple of bids and they’ll explain how they intend to do it.
A.R.Crane
You watch This Old House and its off-spins…regularly…don’t you?
I was referring to “slab shifting techniques”…like bed-rock anchors and slab-jacking. the sump pit is a great idea if the unwanted watershed goes in one direction or towards one corner but if it simply flows to any exterior wall you may need something more corrective.
ftr…2:0x am Sunday 10.21.07 and This Old House is on…yeeehaa I LOVE this show.
No “r” in my screen name.
Yeah, I watch TOH sometimes. Also, in my early years I did plumbing and pipefitting, also attended several votech schools in the trades and later taught the same.
I doubt it’s a settling problem. There’d be cracks in the floor if it settled that much and it just doesn’t sound like settling.
I had a problem with the floor drain in my workshop flooding in our old house. It seems that it is downstream from an exterior drain at the bottom of our basement steps, so when there would be heavy rain, I’d get several inches of water in the workshop.
This wouldn’t solve the problem of the floor drain not being at the low point, of course, but the check valve would keep the sewer from backing up onto the floor. The one I got, which is the one in the link, costs under 20 bucks, and installs with a screwdriver quite easily.
As for the floor, I suppose one option would be to rent a concrete floor grinder and bevel the floor so the drain would be at the low spot, but I’ve never used one. Someone who knows better may have some input.
This is a common problem with areas of certain soil types; the underlying soils settle and shift so that things don’t end up draining the way they were originally intended to.
We have extremely expansive clay soils in our area, which are known to wreak havoc on foundations. I toured a ‘for sale’ home here once which had a good 6 to 8 inch fall from front door to back. :eek:
We used a grinder while remodeling a while back. If we’re talking about an inch or less of material to remove, a grinder will work just fine. Anything greater than that, and it’s probably not a workable solution. Grinding is tedious and kicks up a lot of noxious dust (wear a mask). I agree with A.R. Cane, an easier thing might be to demo the floor in the low spot and install a sump pump to feed to the original drain.
Given the information,a sump w/pump and new discharge tied in to the sewer makes the most sense.Put the sump in the lowest spot,obviously.
Most municipalities I know about prohibit storm drain tie in to sewage,and having a port to back up in as you do would raise eyebrows with health inspectors.Plug the port.The check valve cited by 2nd Law seems sensible.Tree roots in the line have destroyed its integrity,I would abandon it.
Around here your problem might raise other issues,which while avoidable during your ownership would come back to bite you in the ass at resale.A third party building inspector licensed in your municipality (or knowledgeable thereof) may be a wise consult.
Yeah, resale issues abound here. Sump pumps are not good news in the resale market here in Denver, either.
OTOH, in my neighborhood 85% of the houses sold become either pop-tops or scrape-offs, with the majority being straight scrape-offs, according to a realtor in the area, anyway. So whoever buys my house is more likely than not just buying it for the lot.
Experiments with a marble and a level indicate that either the basement was poured crooked, oddly enough tilting toward the uphill side, or else it’s shifted. The furnace room (the one with the drain) has waves like the ocean, onceyou get to rolling a marble around in that room. It’s amazing.
I guess I’ll have to call a professional and see what the damage would be. It occurs to me that they would do the whole basement, probably not just the one room. Major hassle. Yuck.
So was it, ummm, your shit or somebody else’s? (outside your home?)
What if you run the shower or dishwasher? Does that back up into the basement?
I’m leaning towards blockage instead of a slope problem. I mean, it seems as you have a slope problem as the water doesn’t go towards your drain. That happens a lot with old houses and there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it (cheaply anyways)
But, the good news is that there shouldn’t be any water/sewage lying in the basement to have to drain.
You can rent a pipe snake from Home Depot or the like…well, is it only sewage, only your (household) sewage, or is it all things which drain (shower water, sink, dishwasher, etc.) ?
ETA: btw, I had a similar problem in a 1940 era home
