Picking up where the title left off, I was rudely awaken by the high water alarm from my sump pump. This was odd, as we have an electric pump and a venturi backup that’s powered by city water.

The electric pump wasn’t running when I got into the basement and the backup hadn’t been triggered yet. I guess the radon folks messed with the sensor’s height when they were here. I’ll address that later.

Manually triggering the backup resulted in turbulence in the sump pit, but no change in water level. Maybe the backflow vavle and the electric pump have both failed?

I finally put my hand in the pit to feel for backflow. There wasn’t any. I felt around for the float for the pump, found it, and pushed it down some. The pump turned on, but sounded like it was working hard. No real change to water level. I’ll need to figure out why the float going too high results in the pump turning off. Maybe overtravel turnoff is intentional? Seems odd. I put this on the back burner too.

I went out into the rain and popped the cap on the alternate outlet. Water shot out. It was 12:45 AM and I was now wide awake.

Today I found roots chasing the line with a snake. Rather than just clear them out, I figured I would address the source of entry so I wouldn’t have to clean it out again. I’m very pleased in how well I located the hole. I was afraid I would have to be digging around for a while, but the snake told me how far to go and I had a pretty solid guess where the line ran.