volksdragon | May. 15th, 2006

We have somehow (amazingly, based on what happened last year) avoided any major water into our basement through these MILLION DAYS of rain. We have a teeny seepage in through a hairline crack in the front of the house, but my nifty sump-pump setup outside the back door has remained mostly untested. I think it filled up ONCE Friday night, and emptied, because the next morning when I checked it, it was still partially filled, but lower than it had been before. I was secure enough in our dryness that I loaned poor

technoluddite (See his blog for the tale) our pump, hand-delivering it to Revere last night, and spending some time with him getting the generator and pump running for a while. He reports this morning he is down to a foot of water, from the 29 inches he had last night when I arrived. By his math, 29 inches of water in 2200 sq. ft of space is approximately 40 THOUSAND gallons of water. We were over there until about 1:30 this morning doing what we could, and I was up again this morning to go to Lowes at 7:15am, and I scored him a pretty LARGE sewage sump, the last sump pump in the entire store, which will pump out water, sewage, "solids" (yuck) and other yummy things in a basement soup at the rate of 7000 gal/hr. Pretty spiffy. I'll trade him for the little pump back (and a lot of money) and he should be much happier.

I also (oops) managed to create my own little puddle with our dehumidifier (craigslist find) when I mis-seated the drain bucket last night after rigging up the outflow to pump out through the furnace-drain pump. I'm CLEVAH. (I'll also probably need a replacement furnace pump into another year, but they're cheap.)

In the meantime, our basement is staying dry, and I'm working on the same for a friend.