When Sump Pumps Attack

We interrupt this regularly scheduled post on Hawaii for an emergency bulletin. The day after we came back from Hawaii, the alarm on the sump pump started going off in the basement. This isn’t terribly shocking. The thing is tempermental at best. So I silenced it, and then silenced it again when it went off an hour later. I checked the power breaker to see if maybe something had switched off, and it did seem that something might have. So I made sure all was as it should be, and thought no more of it.

Until it went off again this morning while Denisa was getting ready. I was heading in later for a doctor’s appointment, so I resolved to go down to the basement and find out if something really was wrong. Spoiler alert: something was.

Basically, the pump wasn’t pumping. That’s kind of a problem, since it’s the one thing it’s supposed to do. A bigger problem was that I didn’t know why. I didn’t want to just call a plumber without trying to fix it myself, so I spent an hour and change disassembling the housing so I could get at the pump. Once that was done, I decided that there was no way I knew enough about what I was doing to trust myself to fix the problem. Water in basements is a bad thing, and our basement can get a fair bit of it. That pump needed to work.

Thankfully, a friend came over at lunch and we got it swapped out. The old one was covered in rust and scale to the point that when we bought the new one, I assumed it was a totally different make and model. Nope: just rust-free.

All told, it was a $250 fix, and just took a few hours. Could have been worse, for sure, but it also ate all the time I had for blogging. So . . . this is all you get. PSA: check your sump pumps, people.