The continuing saga of the sump pump

Hello everyone!

I have been accused by many of being remiss in my duties to post to the Happy Bungalow Blog so I am taking this opportunity to set things right and do my part. If I can offer any excuse at all it would be that I have been working on the Happy Bungalow so much to the extent that I didn't have time to do the posts to the blog.

So, there may be some retroactive posting going on here in the future as I am behind at least one or two posts. However, I thought I would start with the most recent events in a effort to at least get things in perspective and I can fill in the back story later.

So, just to catch everyone up, we have been experiencing some flooding issues with the sump and the floor drains in the basement. These issues surfaced when we had a sudden snow melt when temperatures rocketed towards 50 degrees in a matter of hours. The 2 feet of snow on the ground melted and the Chicago sewer system became over loaded and flooding was prevalent in our area. Northern parts of Albany Park reported flooding and for the first time since we have acquired the Happy Bungalow I began to see some issues with the drains.

This all started on the 26th of December and has been continuing since. Now, I have a lot of backfill about that time period but in synopsis: I had noticed that the drains in the basement seemed full and they began to back up on the basement floor. At this time a ton of water was pouring into our sump and we attributed this to a broken drain tile pipe that we recently had to clear out using a power rod and a rather expensive but very good plumbing outfit.

To make a long story short, I re-routed the sump pump line directly into the catch basin in the back because the theory was that due to the broken drain tile, the water that the sump was pumping into the gutter line was draining back into the sump and simply being recirculated. This caused the pump to run every 4 to 5 minutes for hours on end when there was a lot of water.

This kept us up nights, literally (more on that later) and so eventually I had to reroute the line just to deal with the flooding. Basically I bypassed the current sump pump pipe system and ran PVC directly to the catch basin. I left myself an out and installed a couple of valves on the output in case I needed to reroute the water elsewhere or go to a plan B in a hurry.

This worked for a little while until the temperature dropped to well below freezing.

Heather's Uncle Joe had been by to see the place for the first time since we moved in along with Judy and her children. While Heather was showing them around I had shown Joe the latest issues to get his take on things. He told me he thought I was on the right track but that the current configuration of the sump line was going to be in danger of freezing. Joe is a wise man when it comes to Geology, water and old houses and despite his sagely advice, I never did get around to rerouting the line into a more freeze friendly configuration.

Frankly, in the back of my mind, I knew I was headed for a fall here but I was so glad that this all the work I had done had stopped the sump pump from running every 5 minutes that I just reveled in my temporary success a little too long and never got around to what I should have done in the first place. I allowed myself to get lulled into a false sense of security.

So, finally after about a week, the temperature dropped drastically. I had a late night rehearsal with the fusion project I recently started and I came back home and finally got to bed around 12 midnight. I must admit, when I walked into the kitchen from the garage that I detected a decidedly funky smell.

We had had some funky smells from the drains since our last back up incident so I figured it was more of the same and plugged the drains in the kitchen and went to bed.

I awoke at 3 in the morning from an awful nightmare that I can't remember. However, I can tell you this: It was perhaps the most fortuitous nightmares I have had to date. Here is why: I woke up, literally sat straight up in bed and noticed that the sump was running. It wasn't cycling on and off, it was just running straight.

I jumped out of bed and ran down to check it and was greeted with the most awful smell of sewage. Yeah, that is what I call a nice wake up call at 3 in the morning.

The sump pump was running full bore and the water in the sump was steaming. Yes dear reader, steaming. The pump had been running so long that it was in the process of overheating and melting down. It had been dissipating it's heat into the surrounding water and this had heated the water to the point of evaporation.

I quickly unplugged the sump pump and shut it down before it burned out. I tried the backup that I installed but this pump did the same thing. It would run but it would not clear the sump pit.

Let me tell you, no man has ever felt so alone than when he realizes that he has sewage draining into his sump pit and the sump line is frozen. You can only imagine how much I had wished I re-routed that line before everything froze.

Fortunately, due to last weekends adventures, I had an arsenal of pumps ready to go. So, I choked back the urge to vomit and threw the submersible utility pump in the sump, ran the drain hose into the utility sink and cleared the sump to prevent any flooding.

I was alright for now. The lines were frozen but at least I had a way to drain the sump. It might mean staying up all night again but at least I would ward off the flooding. Really, I had just solved problem 1: the frozen sump line.

Problem 2 was a little more complex: sewage back up in the sump. Why was this happening and why now? Before it was just water...why sewage? It wasn't even raining or snowing and we didn't have a melt situation on our hands.

Here is what the water looked like in the sump:




Yes, that's gray water, not exactly what you want to see in your basement floor drains.

So, I kept pumping it out and eventually it stopped being so gray. Although, in this picture, you can see how its running out of one of the drain tiles:



Ok, the auto focus got messed up on this shot, but you get the idea. Trust me, you don't really want to see this in too much clarity anyway.

So, I spend the rest of the night pumping out the sump pit every 1/2 hour and place a call to the city to have them look at the storm drains. My plan at this point is to ride out the flooding downstairs with the pumps on hand until Home Depot or the Crafty Beaver opens so I can buy some more PVC and re-route the sump line AGAIN.

In the meanwhile, I decide that maybe I can do something about the frozen sump line. I get Heather's hair dryer and a microphone stand and some packing tape and start to try and jet hot air on the sump line to melt the ice. Check out my makeshift contraption:



My musician friends will love this: this is how you close mike a frozen sump line. HA! Sorry, it was the only bit of humor I could muster at 4 am when the temperature was a balmy 4 degrees. And so I began the hopeless task of thawing the pvc line. I moved the hair dryer every 15 to 30 minutes. I would try occasionally to pump water through the line but it remained frozen.

I kept this up throughout the night until morning when I gave up and decided: "to heck with this, I will just rebuild the line with a downward slope like Uncle Joe advised."

So, the Water department shows up at 8:30am to check the sewers and they tell me that everything is fine on the city's side and that what I need is to have the drains power rodded out from the house to the street. Around 9 or so I call Big Mike's plumbing and they promise to come out and power rod the drains.


Well, Big Mike came out and I showed them the whole deal, the catch basin, the sump, the drains and the clean out in the front. Big Mike decided we should power rod towards the street through the clean out. After digging out the clean out cap out of the frozen ground they rodded the drains out and we achieved drain nirvanah once agian.

The sump stopped backing up with sewage, the nasty smells went away and the drains in the basement floor went back to normal water levels and stopped backing up. Thank heavens.

So, that was it, the drain on the way to the street was clogged with tree roots and Big Mike rodded them out. He explained that the tree roots grow into the clay pipe that comprises the drain tile system. You heard me sports fans: the tree roots grow through the clay pipe. Think of it like a chia pet in reverse. Those trees are so hungry for water that the roots seek any source of water they can find.

Yep, as gross as it is, they tap that sewer pipe (easy fellas, it's not that kind of tapping) and they just move into the pipe and take it over. After awhile, they restrict the flow of....er....water...and you have backup hell.

So, for now, problem solved. I have some more on how I resolved the whole frozen sump line issue but we have to sign off for now. Heather's yelling about watching some BSG.

Hope you found this entertaining - see you at the next post!

Michael