I’ve been reminded, once again (and twice in the last week) the reason why I don’t have my computers and home office in the basement. Our sump pump has worked like a charm for years, until last Thursday, when it decided not to start. This disrupted my video production experiments, if only for a few hours. With a lemons to lemonade attitude, I decided to document my tried-and-true techniques for dealing with a flooded basement with my trusty Canon and iMovie.

Don’t expect to see this two minute epic at Blockbuster. It’s strictly an online opus.

I didn’t expect a second screening so soon… but when I woke up this morning, I could tell that the basement was flooded again. I had meant to pull the sump pump out of the hole to check out the float switch over the weekend. Alas, other tasks got in the way, and here I was, babysitting a sump pump with a cranky switch, once again.

Arrrrr! Swab the decks!

I ran out to the hardware store (in the driving rain, no less) to pick up a new sump pump, thinking that I’d replace the switch on the old pump and set the hole up with a dual pump setup for those hurricane days… after this storm had passed. I figured that the remove and replace would take all of five minutes, just as long as I could swap in a new piece of plastic pipe and a check valve with the new pump.

And that’s where the plan fell short. The hardware store was out of 1-1/2-inch check valves. The fellow at the counter suggested that I just swap the check valve and pipe from the old pump to the new pump. “It’ll be easy to unscrew the pipe,” he promised.

With water gushing into the sump hole, I pulled out the old pump and attempted to unscrew the pipe and check valve. I struggled with it for a good five minutes. No such luck. In the meantime, the water had started running up and out of the sump hole.

I dropped the original pump back in the hole, and hooked everything up… lo and behold, the pump started working. Sure, it refused to start a few times, but once I gave the pipe a jostle, the pump started cranking.

After a while, the switch actually began to work properly.

It’s a variation of Murphy’s Law: Whatever was broken will magically heal itself, but only after you’ve spent good money on its replacement. Lets hope it holds up overnight…

[tags]drying out a basement, basement flooding, flooded basement[/tags]