The Bathroom Basement - Sinking The Sump Pump

There was one thing that was obvious to me that Thursday back in April when I went into the bathroom basement - the whole basement was full of water.  Duh! Was that an intelligent observation, eh!?

The sump pump wasn't working and the steel barrel was too far out of the hole which meant that we couldn't lower the water table down far enough to keep the moisture at a minimum.  And it hadn't been sunk down into the mud properly which was the first problem that had to be solved.  You can see that the steel barrel  needs to be lowered at least another 12". 

Plus there were piles of mud and clay that were still piled up all over the place from when we had last dug the sump pit and the ditches for the drain tile.  Here's a photo that outlines the water level in the bathroom basement. 

The second problem was to see why the sump pump wasn't working.  Was it a float that was stuck?  Was the pump clogged up with mud?  Or had the motor burned out?

All of the sump pumps were submersibles which meant that the motor can't ever be drowned.  I've had a couple of situations with "upright" sump pumps where the motor perches on the top of the propeller shaft.  Only problem is that the floats stick, the water rises and drowns the motor.  Don't ever plug in a drowned sump pump!!  Usually the problem with a submersible sump pump is either the motor has burned out or the floats are stuck.

So on Thursday, June 30th, with two young volunteers, Corey and Mike, we started the process of dewatering the bathroom basement.

The first step was to get rid of the water.  Since the sump pump wasn't working, I had to find another sump pump.  Fortunately, Bill M happened to have his portable sump pump and hose with him so we managed to get that into the sump pit after removing the broken sump pump.  After 15 minutes of pumping, we had the water down to a more manageable level. Next Mike and I dug out the 45-gallon steel barrel with Corey trucking the plastic pails of clay to the outside and dumping them into the outer swamp.  In about 20 minutes we had the steel barrel removed and out of the way.

I then stepped into the hole and started to dig.  As I shuffled my feet around in the narrow hole, the water soon turned the clay into a soup.  Using a combination of digging with the shovel and shuffling my feet around, I managed to dig the hole another 2 feet deeper.  Only problem was that the hole was full of this sloppy muddy mess.  Corey rescued some Tim Horton's coffee cups and I scooped up this thick soup, complete with rocks, into the plastic pails which Mike dumped into the baggage room basement next door.

In between, I carted the sump pump outside where Bill M took a look at it to see if the motor was seized.  With a pail of water, he plugged the pump in, raised the floats, and a jet of water shot out of the exhaust port.  A closer look at the pump revealed that the plastic clip had broken off which stopped the floats from shutting off.  The fix for that would have to wait another week as the necessary parts were back home.

With the hole now cleaned out to a depth of 4', we set two concrete blocks into the bottom of the hole as a base for the sump pump and placed the steel barrel liner on top of the concrete blocks.  By this time, John W had brought down half a tractor bucket of that 1" clear septic-bed crushed stone from the north end.  Corey and Mike then started to bring the stone in using the plastic pails.  As Mike lifted each pail of stone through the opening, I dumped the stone around the sides of the barrel until we had the hole back-filled with the stone.

As the two photos below show, the barrel was now at least 12" - 16" lower in the ground than what they were before.  Now we could start to lower the water table and start to dry out the clay.  Quite a difference from the two photos above, eh!? 

By this time it was 2pm and time for me to leave so we have to leave fixing the sump pump to next week.