On Apr 29, 8:57*pm, micky wrote:
On Mon, 29 Apr 2013 11:14:40 -0400, micky
wrote:



If most of the roof water goes to the sump pump, I'm
suprised it can even handle it during a downpour.

I came home one day and found my sump pump runing full blast and still
the basement floor was flooded. Just a little bit but the entire floor
and not deep because all the boxes on the floor had sucked up lots of
water. * * *Much** of the water from my downspouts goes indirectly
into my sump pump but it takes hours or days to get there. *It's not
piped direct ly into the sump pump, like Craig's is.. **And much of
the water from the roof and downspouts seeps to the edge of my
property and into the stream bed on two sides of my house.

I was thinking about what I wrote here. * It probably doesn't take
days for water, on top of the current water table, to get from the
backt of the house to the front.

What I do, and the OP can do, is look at the water level in the sump
when it's not raining. * *I always have a little water, but it's
almost 2 feet below the basement floor.

Then look when and after it's been raining. * *My sump pump goes on
and t hen stops for 5 minutes, or more or less. * *That one time it
was runnning constantly, and even then that might have been enough to
keep up with the water if the water input had been less. * *I've had
flooded basements for various reasons, and the water level never gets
above 1/8", and only once has it gotten out of the laundry room. *I
glued a piece of wood in the doorway, so it won't get out of the
laundry room again, but it is a big sign when I sell the house that
I've had flooding, even if I've solved all the reasons it flooded. Oh,
well.

But none of this helps when there is a power failure, or pump failure,
or you're out of town for a long time and had forgotten to pay the
electric bill so you were behind before you left,l and they disconnect
your electricity.

IIRC, they make a pump of the same configuration that's bigger than
what I have 1/2HP instead of 1/3, or 1/3 instead of 1/4. *I keep
meaning to replace mine. * I also keep looking for a basepump, but
I've decided after years that all of the ones on Ebay will be almost
as expensive as new.

I wonder how much of the roof water goes into his basement
sump pit? If it's all of it or most of it, I'm surprised that he
hasn't
had a flood even with the pump running. It depends on his roof
area and the rain rate. But just looking at a gutter downspout
from any reasonable size roof, during a heavy downpour, it's
a hell of a lot of water. And you're gonna pump all that plus
some ground water too, througha 1 1/2" pipe?
As Bart Simpson would say, Ahye Karumba!

Sometimes you have to use a sump pump for some rainwater as
a last resort because of geography. But in his case, he has
a nice sloping backyard going down to a pond.... In the house
I grew up in, we had a gravity drain that went several hundred
feet down to the flood plain of a creek. It was more work, more
install cost, etc, but far more reliable than a sump pump. And
our roof water didn't go into it....