Last year we had a flood in the basement so now that the spring has arrived and the sump pit is filling up quickly, we decided it was time to test out our pumps.
We have an extreme setup installed after the flood. We have a primary pump, a secondary pump that triggers if the water level is higher than the primary float (that would essentially mean that the primary has failed) and we also have a battery backup pump which is set higher than the secondary.
Our first test was to see what happens when the primary is unplugged. We started this test Saturday night at 8PM. I chuckled as I realized no good ever comes from us doing tests on the sump pump during the night.
Sure enough, by midnight the water level was near the top of the drain inlet and the secondary pump had not triggered yet. It does work, we checked it. But I wanted to make sure the system works as it should without us being there.
I put a mattress down near the sump pit and slept until 3:30am when an alarm from the battery backup started blaring. So somehow the secondary never triggered at all which eventually had the battery backup turn on! Hmm…what to do there. For hi
storical reference, this means that it took a full 7.5 hours to get to six inches from the top of the sump pit. This is in the spring where the temperature outside was -5.
At 3:30am in the morning, there’s not much to do. It was like waking up to a crying baby all over again. I plugged the primary pump back in, watched all the water get out, and tried to figure out how to turn off this dang alarm that was blaring in my ear on a Sunday morning. Maybe I should have consulted the manual BEFORE this experiment?
The weird thing is…after a few minutes, I heard this gushing of water coming back INTO the discharge pipe! What the heck is going on there? I decided that the pumps were working fine so it was time to go outside to see if there was something wrong with the other end of teh discharge pipe. Visions of ice forming and blocking the front of pipe haunted me as I walked out in the crisp winter night.
No ice was found but there was a LOT of water in the ditch. I think there was so much that a lot of it just crept back up the pipe. After I spent ten minutes outside analyzing the situation, everything fixed itself by the time I got back inside.
As I write this, I have performed a few more tests on the secondary pump on Sunday but no matter where I position the float, it does not trigger on within a reasonable amount of time. I don’t really like the idea of having water accumulate around my house for four hours. At this point, I have stumbled upon the thought of taking the float switch off of the actual pump and clamping it to a pipe at a lower level and perhaps that will trigger it. It’s not a bad idea. I need to find a clamp with a clip on it.
Let this be a lesson to those out there with sump pumps…test your emergency system. I had a secondary that didn’t even trigger on and that was installed by a plumber a year ago. Imagine if the primary went on me? I suppose the battery backup would have come in handy then.