Pump That Sump!

We interrupt my planned trilogy on textiles to bring you this update in the wake of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Irene. Besides about 9 hours of power outage and a lot of yard debris, we were incredibly lucky and sustained no damage. We were, however, reminded of how awesome our mostly unappreciated sump pump is.

We lost electricity at about 1am after quite a few hours of sustained rain. The sump pump had been working all Saturday evening, reliably pumping every 15 minutes or so. When we finally got up at 9 the next morning, we took a deep breath and went downstairs to face what we feared would be a totally flooded basement. By some miracle, we were dry! But we figured we should start manually pumping out the sump just in case, because of course we had no idea how long we'd be without power.

So we drained...

 And we drained some more....

(Note the snazzy head lamp. It was dark in the basement!)

The weird thing was how, because of the magical way a sump system works with pressure and water tables and whatnot (you can tell I really did my research here...), we kept draining water but the water level in the sump stayed totally the same! It seemed like something out of a crazy fairy tale! In the end, we drained 100 gallons of water in a little under an hour by hand! It looked like by the end of it that maybe, just maybe, the water level had gone down about a centimeter. Fortunately when we went upstairs to take a break, the lights came back on and the pump could get to work without our manual labor.

And yes, we know we need to install a battery back-up system. But they are really intimidating! We looked into one more than a year ago, expecting to find some kind of mini generator we could plug into our existing sump pump. What exists instead, it seems, is a complete system that would require a total overhaul, like this:

Picture courtesy of Lowes

Totally scary!! So if you have any advice (along the lines of "no really, it's very easy to install") or suggestions for brands or installation techniques, please share them! We don't want to risk a flood next time there's rain and a black-out at the same time (because guess what? those things usually happen at the same time...).