There’s Water Under the House! Post-3
Okay. As promised, here’s the somewhat tardy end to the sump pump project.
Below is a picture of the pump in place. Notice that it’s just sitting in a five gallon bucket. (In plumbing land they call them "basins.") You know, the type that you find in the hardware store? There used to be rather fancy, special, rubberized plastic basins for this sort of job. Now they’re only available for big gray water sump pumps.
The big hole facing you is for water running down to the basin from your point of view. Also note the screw in the outlet pipe. A little feature I added to allow the pump to be changed without having to cut the PVC pipe. It squirts a bit of water, but the pump is so powerful it doesn’t matter. It pumps the five gallon bucket dry in about 10 seconds!
And here’s a picture of the outlet to the street drain. To the right is the core that I drilled out of the stem wall. The green rectangular pipe is the gutter drain.
Notice that the PVC is neither glued nor screwed into the ABS tee. It wasn’t needed. The friction fit is tight, and everything is so secure when assembled it will stay that way until someone decides to physically take it apart.
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Again, thinking ahead to maintenance day reduces the cost of repairs.
At left is a picture of the pump before I installed it in the basin. The funny looking thing attached to it is the float switch that automatically cycles the pump when the basin is full. It’s a nice pump with a 2 year warranty.
Here’s a picture of the main trench running down the center of the house. It gets rather deep in places, as you can see. There’s a hump in the middle of the house, that’s why.
After getting the pump set and plumbed, all that was left was the vapor barrier. There were some problems with that, as you can see in the picture below. (That’s my glove in the foreground. I took it off to take the picture.) The main drain is slightly below grade at this point, and what looks like the mess of insulation is actually insulation wrapped around a central air vent pipe. At the very top edge of the frame, in the middle, you can just see the girder. At this point there’s no way to get the vapor barrier under, over, or even between things in this tight space.
Still, overall it came out satisfactorily. 80% coverage is considered adequate, and we managed to achieve well over 90% coverage with the vapor barrier. In fact, I could feel the difference in temperature beneath the house after it was all down. Much warmer. Much drier.
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