Water in basement

Thursday morning Jason woke me up to tell me that we had water in our basement. We soon discovered that our sump pump had stopped working sometime during the night and water was leaking into our basement from numerous locations. Jason started making some phone calls, while I moved stuff around to get it away from areas that had water.

While we were waiting, our sump pump kicked in a few times, but was still not running as much as it should have been with all the rain we had earlier in the week. For awhile, the water was moving toward the drains at a pretty good pace. I left for work and Jason stayed to wait for the guy who was coming to look at the sump pump. It turns out the float was cracked and our whole sump pump had to be replaced. The total damage - $390.

Looking on the bright side . . .

1. Things could have been much worse: the sump pump could have failed last month. There was a period of a few days in March when the sump pump was running pretty much non-stop to keep up with the heavy rains and the melting snow. Should the sump pump have failed then, we would have had a lot more water in the basement and a lot more damage. In addition, we caught the problem quickly. We don't go down in the basement very often - for me, its to do laundry, which I last did Wednesday night, and to clean out Baloo's "poopy boxes." Because Baloo's "poopy boxes" are down there, we leave the door at the bottom of the stairs open. Jason threw something in the recycling closet at the top of the stairs on Thursday morning and happened to see the puddle at the bottom of the stairs. If he hadn't noticed it, I not sure if I would have noticed it when I got Baloo's food out of the closet to fill up his food dish.

2. The new sump pump is SO much quieter than our old one. Our other sump pump was ridiculously LOUD. In March, when the sump pump was running a lot, Jason and I slept in the spare bedroom because it was too loud in our bedroom (the sump pump is under bedroom and the pipe is mounted underneath our bedroom floor on its way out of the house). Now, even if the new sump pump was running non-stop, it wouldn't be a problem. Loud sump pump problem solved!