On Sunday afternoon, when looking in our basement for some (250mL)
15W-40 engine oil to prep up a 1K2W inverter genset I'd bought from our
local Lidl for 99 quid a couple of hours earlier, I discovered the coal
hole section had become somewhat flooded and threatening to flood the
main part of the basement.

A look for the repurposed W/M drain pump on a piece of plywood that I
had used the last time this had happened over quarter of a century back
failed to reveal my makeshift solution to a problem I'd thought I'd well
and truly sorted out just a year or two after cobbling said emergency
cellar pump so I landed up having to resort to bailing it out into a
plastic bucket and hauling each bucket's worth up the steep stone steps
to hand to my XYL to tip out onto the drive.

Needless to say, this was rather exhausting work so I only lowered the
level by an inch or so to provide some respite against the rest of the
basement floor transitioning from being merely damp to becoming actually
submerged.

A few hours later, in the evening, our son finally emerged from his
'sick bed' (he was suffering from a cold of some sort - he didn't look
particularly ill to me but looks, as I well know, can be deceiving) and
offered to help bail out the basement using his "Wickes Wet 'n' Dry" 20L
vacuum cleaner which he'd parked in the drier part of the basement (and
which I hadn't realised was a "wet 'n' dry" cleaner).

Inconveniently, his offer of help, as per usual, was badly timed since I
was nicely settled in front of my PC monitor, watching the last 45
minutes of E4's "Night at The Museum" evening movie by way of
recuperation so I left him to deal with it, or not, on his own. He chose
not to wait so dealt with it on his own. After the movie was finished I
checked out his handiwork. The coal hole level was down to a few inch
deep puddles which needed further attention (the level had risen by a
half inch or so since he'd last vacuumed up the water about half an hour
earlier).

At this point, I needed him to explain the 'wet' usage of his old Wickes
wet 'n' dry cleaner so I could pump the sump dry. The sump consists of a
75mm plastic pipe concreted in place over a gravel filled sump hole at
the far end of the coal hole that I'd put in place over 25 years ago for
just such an eventuality. It had been hidden from his view by a stack of
heavy duty cardboard tray boxes. I managed to pump out another 60 litres
or so which he obligingly dumped each 20L canister's worth onto the
driveway saving me the 3 or 4 trips up our basement stairway.

This morning, the level had actually dropped a half inch from where it
had risen to some 3 hours after that last pumping out session when I
checked it just after midnight. I managed to pump another 30 or so litres
from the sump this time round suggesting that the local water table is
actually returning back to normality after Saturday's "Monsoon
Downpour" (according to my XYL - I never noticed such an event beyond the
day being a bit wet and rainy).

I guess the problem must have been due to abnormally high rainfall after
all rather than a failure in any of our waste water plumbing or roof
drainage so it looks like I really do need to fit an automatic sump pump
to complete the original project that I'd put on hold after completing
the initial speculative provision of a sump pick up point over quarter of
a century ago.

My problem at the moment is the total and utter failure of internet
search engines to find a local supplier of suitable cost effective *self
priming* sump pumps that don't rely on being submersible to function as
such[1]. I want a pump that I can hang onto the wall (or park on a shelf)
that will allow me to poke its inlet hose down the sump standpipe and
route the outlet hose through a hole in the wall onto the driveway to
pump some 20Lpm against a total of 3 to 5 metres maximum head of water
pressure.

I'm willing to shell out up to 100 quid on a neat, all-in-one readymade
solution but considering the effectiveness of that sub 50 quid wet 'n'
dry vacuum cleaner at extracting the water from the sump standpipe, I'm
half entertaining DIYing my own Franken-solution of adding a W/M pump to
the wet 'n' dry vacuum cleaner along with, if necessary, some electronic
switching logic to do the job "for free" (my son was quite willing to
'sacrifice' his old Wickes vacuum cleaner to the current task even if it
meant it 'blowing up' as a result of such 'abuse').

The reason why I'm only "half entertaining" such a DIY project is that
it would be more by way of metaphorically sticking two fingers up at "The
cellar sump pump industry" for being such a bunch of ****s in failing to
provide the obvious no brainer solution to my current problem since it
would absorb a considerable portion of my free time and energy
(basically, I'm a lazy sod).

Since I've reached the end of my tether in 'googling' a solution (source
of a suitable self priming sump pump), I thought I'd prevail upon the
potential source of collective wisdom and experience of this group for
advice.

[1] Although I'm rather loath to dig out my sump standpipe, if needs
must, I would but, of the bunch of potential 'submersible' pumps on page
121 of the Toolstation catalogue, it worries me a little as to what the
description "Not suitable... for permanent installation." implies about
each and every one of these pumps. Do they mean, "Don't chop the 13A plug
off and wire into an FCU." or does it mean they're simply not able to
withstand being sat in a puddle of water indefinitely in between pumping
sessions?

--
Johnny B Good