brownsl
02-25-05, 09:52 AM
Back in early January we had a lot of snow and then rain here in West Central Ohio. The sump pump in our basement could not keep up with the amount of water and we ended up with 3 inches of water in it before I was able to track down a second pump at a Home Depot. This second pump, in addition to the first one, was able to empty the basement.
Before we refinish the basement I want to try and prevent this from happening again. A solution would be to mount this second pump such that if we get this much water again it will be able to assist. We have only electric so if we olse power we could be in trouble again. We are on a well so the water-driven backup is out of the question, so I was thinking about getting an electric standby generator.
However, after reading many of the threads on this great website I was wondering if I could do the following:
We have quite a bit of land with some of it being lower than the bottom of the basement. Could I just dig a trench down to below the basement floor on the outside corner of the house and all the way out to this lower point (~300 ft) put in some piping and let gravity drain the area around our foundation for us? Would we still need a sump pump backup? Would we still even need a sump pump at all? I am hoping this avoids getting a second pump plus a generator. However, we have limestone under us (after about ~2 ft of topsoil) so this might be prohibitively expensive??
Shawn
Before we refinish the basement I want to try and prevent this from happening again. A solution would be to mount this second pump such that if we get this much water again it will be able to assist. We have only electric so if we olse power we could be in trouble again. We are on a well so the water-driven backup is out of the question, so I was thinking about getting an electric standby generator.
However, after reading many of the threads on this great website I was wondering if I could do the following:
We have quite a bit of land with some of it being lower than the bottom of the basement. Could I just dig a trench down to below the basement floor on the outside corner of the house and all the way out to this lower point (~300 ft) put in some piping and let gravity drain the area around our foundation for us? Would we still need a sump pump backup? Would we still even need a sump pump at all? I am hoping this avoids getting a second pump plus a generator. However, we have limestone under us (after about ~2 ft of topsoil) so this might be prohibitively expensive??
Shawn