The Basement Dilemma

This blog post is mostly so that I have a record of my thoughts on this subject for posterity. Having said that, comments from people who know more about the topic than me are very welcome... and since that includes just about everybody on the planet, you should feel free to comment!

Yesterday we had both the basement/drainage people here and a technologist from the city (think City Engineer but not quite the same). The drainage company scoped out the drain line that backed up on Nov 29th and flooded our basement (for the first time in, we're guessing, 25 years or more). They had a long rigid hose with a camera and light at the end of it, and fed it down through the cleanout that's located a few feet from the drain that overflowed. We got to watch this, and what we saw was a fairly clean, unbroken pipe that ran about 75 feet and ended in a sewer at the street. There was one very small tree root visible at one point over that length, but it was obviously not affecting anything. We had expected to see a break of some sort, as a result of the destruction that the city did to our front yard over the summer, but there was really nothing to see.

At that point, Vicki called the city. She told them that the scope had revealed nothing that could explain the problem, and asked if that meant that the city sewers simply couldn't handle the volume on Nov 29th. And if so, were they going to do anything about it before it reoccurred? She also told him that the people who had done the investigation were now about to install a backflow preventer and sump pump. He explained that there was a municipal grant program in effect that would reimburse home owners for part of the cost of both those additions (75%, up to a dollar maximum that really meant it was more like 50% given the actual costs). This is available because it's cheaper for the city to do that than to spend the millions on re-engineering the sewers.

However, the catch with the sump pump installation is that, in order to get the grant money for it, you have to ensure that your weeping tiles are disconnected from the city sewers. In other words, the city is only willing to pay if you take your runoff ground water out of the common system and deal with it yourself (by spraying it onto your yard, as output from the sump pump). The person telling us this, when he learned that the work was being done right now, said that he'd be out within the hour as he wanted to talk to the contractors and also speak to us in person.

Sure enough, he showed up about an hour later, and was very helpful. He brought the application forms for the grants, as well as some other pamphlets related to it and copies of the diagrams that had been filed away when our house was built! These latter items showed where the drains in the house were, were everything attached to the weeping tiles, and so on. He explained to the workers that they'd have to disconnect the weeping tiles from the sewer line, which they weren't planning to do, and that they needed permits for the work they were about to do, which they didn't have. He also reminded them that an inspection would have to be done on the job when they were finished, meaning that an inspector had to be lined up. They then ran the scope through the line again, so that he could see it. By this point they'd jackhammered a huge hole in our basement floor over the cleanout, and had begun digging a hole in our backyard just outside the room that was going to house the sump pump. When he pointed out that they needed permits which they didn't have, all work stopped. Nothing has resumed since.

So now we're trying to figure out what we really need. The more I've learned about the sump pump addition, the less I've liked it. For one thing: our problem was caused by the drain backing up, which a backflow preventer (installed into the pipe where the cleanout is) should take care of. We've never had water get into the basement through the foundation, meaning that the weeping tiles have always done their job and drained the groundwater, during wet periods, into the pipe that runs to the sewer. By installing the sump pump and disconnecting that line, we run the risk that our new pump won't function as well as the tiles did. It can't possibly function any better, as the water was always taken away from the house that way. So we could spend thousands only to have worse results than we've had for the past 13 years. And then there's the fact that the tiles only rely on gravity to work, whereas a sump pump runs on electricity, has moving parts that can wear out, requires a working float (or equivalent) to detect when to come on, could blow fuses on us, etc., etc., etc. Therefore I'm thinking we don't want the sump pump, but of course if I'm wrong, we risk future water damage in the basement.

As for the backflow preventer, the catch there seems to be that, when it's 'engaged' (meaning the valve has closed to prevent water from coming into the house from the sewer) we may not be able to flush our toilets, have showers or run water in general in the house. That's bad enough, but we also have no way of knowing that it's engaged unless we go down into the basement, lift the device's cover up, and look to see what position the valve is in. What are the chances that we'd think to do that every time it rained? And how many times do you check during a period when it rains for several days? What happens if you don't check, and you fill the pipes with potentially dirty water that can't leave the house through that pipe? I suppose one way to look at it is that, without the backflow preventer, water would be running into the basement anyway, so we're no worse off. Also, since that's only happened once in 13 years, maybe the chances of it happening again in the future are very slim. But what if something changed making it more likely? Then what? I'm completely out of my element when it comes to house-related issues like this, and so everything about this worries me. I barely got any sleep last night, thanks to yesterday's events.

So that's where it stands now. I hope to talk to my brother Richard about this soon, as he's about a million times more knowledgeable about such things than I am. Not that that's hard to do, unfortunately.