I bought a house about 5 years ago and I’ve never been able to figure out how this is supposed to work. It came with an interior perimeter drain system in the basement that feeds into a sump in the corner. The pump feeds into the same drain pipe that the gutters feed into that leads out into the street.
Right now that pipe is frozen or clogged, and it’s raining, and snow’s melting. I’ve got the gutters pulled away from the house as much as possible, but there’s still entirely too much water getting dumped around my foundation. And, either consequently or because something else is going on the sump pump fires off about every 5 minutes and ejects, oh, a lot of water, maybe 2-5 liters. This is not unusual; the pump will generally fire a few times a day when it’s not raining, and very, very frequently when it is.
Is this normal? Is the pump going to burn out from turning on all the time? Is there some sort of pump maintenance that I should have been doing for the last 5 years? The sump is sealed all around with silicone, and there’s just a tiny plastic window in the lid that I use to see all the dirt and grime that’s collected in there over the years. It just doesn’t feel right to me.
The frozen pipe may be restricting the flow and the pump is only removing a small amount of water. In the midst of winter I faced this problem once and started pouring salt into the sump hole. It probably shortened the life of the pump but the alternative was letting the basement fill with water. As long as the water is not climbing up to floor level you should be fine. Also the pump should have an adjustment to control the maximum water level before it turns on, and much the level has to drop before it goes off. That adjustment may or may not help your circumstance, but possibly it’s the only problem you have, that the pump is cycling too quickly.
in poor draining situations (heavy clay, frozen earth) and lots of water (rain, melting snow days) you could have it turn on every 5 to 10 minutes.
make sure the check valve (one way valve) in the outlet pipe is working. there should be one in the vertical outflow pipe a few feet above the pump.
2 to 5 liters is not a big ejection. the sump pit should 80% empty each time, maybe 10 times as much.
make sure the outlet pipe into the storm water drain and the storm water drain (the pipe out to the street) are unclogged. if it is clogged, or you don’t know, you could temporarily put a sump outlet hose out onto the lawn (just make sure that it goes downhill away from the house so that it empties).
Thanks for the replies. We do have lots of clay here.
I don’t see a check valve anywhere on the outlet pipe. It seems like a low-dollar setup compared to what I’ve seen online. There’s no alarm even.
There’s a float that I can see through the window, but I don’t see any way to adjust the level. It definitely doesn’t fill up 80% before discharging, more like 5-10%. That may be the issue then. I unplugged it last night when I realized the drain pipe was clogged and this morning it was probably around 80% full. I plugged it in and it emptied out pretty quickly.
Would it be worth cracking the silicone seal around the lid to see if I can adjust the level?
A sealed lid around a sump pump crock doesn’t have anything to do with how the pump works. It’s either there just to keep things out of the hole, or because you’ve got a radon mitigation system in the basement and having one of those requires a sealed up sump pump.
So, crack away at the lid and get down in that hole The pump will die soon enough anyway and the lid will have to come off then.
Recognizing that breaking the silicone seal on the sump will also start letting more radon in. So after you’ve got your pump & freezing challenges resolved you’ll want to seal it back up to preserve the radon reduction.
I had a plumbing company come out and unclog the drain pipe, then I cracked the silicone seal so I could have a look inside. The plot thickens!
Now that the water is able to go to the street and doesn’t just come right back into the sump through my basement walls, the flow from the perimeter pipes has stopped, which means the pump is no longer kicking on every 5 minutes.
However, while sitting there on the floor watching water drip, my furnace kicked on. The furnace is a high efficiency model that drains into the sump as well. This I knew. What I didn’t know was just how much water that thing puts out. So that explains why the pump turns on every hour or so even when it’s not raining.
This is interesting to me, because it means that I have an actual issue on my hands. In winter, when my street is full of ice and snow and slush, and it’s below freezing, my stupid well-meaning sump pump is shoving water into a place where it’s not wanted. It then freezes, backs up the drain pipe, and then I’m spending a couple hundred bucks to have it cleared out so my foundation doesn’t wash away.
I need to figure out if I can run the furnace outlet over to the sewer drain then.
The furnace in my current house does drain into the floor (sanitary) drain. The furnace is about three feet from the drain, a piece of hard plastic pipe just runs across the floor and turns down into the floor drain. If it wasn’t for the water heater it would be a tripping hazard.
In a previous house, the furnace/A/C was twenty feet away from the basement floor drain. There was a mini sump pump, the furnace/A/C drained into the minipump, which would pump the water up to joist level, across the overhead (not a finished basement) and down into the floor drain next to the washing machine. The connection was just some tubing (Tygon?)When the A/C was running it would run about every five minutes.
The pump will die soon enough anyway and the lid will have to come off then.