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.

  • Ken Oh@feddit.onlineEnglish
    9·
    17 hours ago

    My parents had a lot of weird names for stuff that no one else would understand. Basically inside jokes. I grew up thinking “sump pump” was one of them, because of how stupid it sounds.

    • IMALlama@lemmy.worldOP
      2·
      7 hours ago

      If you don’t live in an area where basements are common odds are you wouldn’t ever encounter one.

      I completely agree that the name is very weird. “Why yes, I’ll call an area that tends to accumulate fluids a sump. No, not a swamp. A sump.”

      In the world of internal combustion you know someone is serious about their engine when they tell you it has a dry sump. “I took the place the motor oil accumulates and made it dry”. Which is honestly kind of a misnomer, they really just added a drain and a pump to put it in a remote reservoir.

    • Big_Boss_77@lemmy.world
      5·
      16 hours ago

      Same… and I had no idea until I was older that a “sump” is just a low place for water to gather… common term in aquariums as well.

  • altphoto@lemmy.today
    12·
    1 day ago

    Wife: nice! That’s like a quick 5 dollar fix. Hurry up! I wanna go to Costco and you’re coming with.

    Pipe: just me down here. Keep digging! One more foot man! You’re close! 6feet later…nah, you’re definitely almost here…jup! That’s a piece of pipe!