Excessive Rain Water In Sump

As a public service I thought I'd change the topic from Corona virus for a bit.

We moved into this house in the country about 5 months ago. House is 25 years old, poured foundation. This area is infamous for having a high water table, yards around here (Marysville, OH) are soaked well into summer. Today we've gotten at least a half inch of rain, the yard looks like a pond. This is what our sump is doing during the height of rain. When not raininghe sump is still filling, but nowhere near this rate. We are planning to finish the basement but at this point I have no faith that I'll be able to keep this basement dry. The pump is working great, basement watchdog system with battery backup. Tonight I just bought an entire second system to leave in the box on standby just in case. We're also looking at a backup house genny. If I lost power my basement would be flooded in minutes.

What in the world going on with our foundation, drainage, grading, whatever to cause this? What type of contractor do I need to look to for help? We had a basement dry company come out, all they could offer was to install a larger sump pit with their own branded triple redundancy pump. That doesn't feel like it's solving the real problem though.

 

Is there water coming through the walls?

 

No, just the drain tile feeding into the sump basin. This house did have some bowing on an adjacent wall (odd for poured wall) that was resolved with a bunch of I beams by the previous owner.

 

Is that drain tile inside the foundation or outside?

 

Outside

 

Rising groundwater below the slab? If it is a full, no exit basement, not much you can do.

 

I like Zoeller pumps myself, but that pump seems to be doing exactly what it needs to be doing, and is keeping up. Having said that, there's plenty of room in that crock for a 2" pump.

Do you have positive slope away from your foundation? And do you have your downspouts piped away from the house as well? You'll never control the water table completely, but those two things can help.

On a side note, we drilled 1/8" holes towards the bottom of my crock, so it gets the water under my slab about 18" lower than the pipe inlets at the top. It has seemed to keep it from running non stop after a heavy rain.

 

Where does the outside drain lead to? Also is it pvc or corrugated pipe? If it's the latter it's possible it could be leaking and saturating the ground and depending on the possible leaky area water runoff may be working its way back to your pit. I just redid my drain lines because I found leaks and upon further inspection found clogging, tree roots major breakage.

 

I also have 2 pits with a main pump and built in battery back up to each. I've also routed extension cords to my basement in the event of power failure I plug into my generator.

 

Slope grading is worth a look. Honestly it only does this when the rain is coming from the West or North. When coming from the south or south west where the grading is better it's not this bad. The drains for the down spouts are buried. I might try attaching pipes to the downspouts to divert from the buried lines to see if this helps. The sump line is buried too, no idea where it goes in the yard.

 

Sounds very similar to a problem I had with my first home. It was so bad I began getting estimates for a french drain system for the sides and back of my home as I thought that was the weak link and where the water was rising from the most.

My first plan of attack was checking the grading against the foundation all the way around the house, anywhere that was neutral or worse got a scoop of dirt so as to pitch water away from the house.
Second, was controlling/redirecting all the rain water coming out of the downspouts, you want this water as far away as possible. Mine didn't have any extensions and I believe this was causing 90% of my problems, once I added a length or two of corrugated piping during storms, pitching all that water away from the house it helped a ton!
If you have an ultra flat yard then I'm afraid your job just got tougher but plan smart if you have grades you can work with.

For me, doing these two things helped me improve my water seeping into the basement through the floor issues 75+%. I was now ONLY seeing water or dampness coming through the floor on the absolute worse storms.

A few yrs later, we added a decent sized addition (22x20) to the back of our home which included a french drain system, that improved our problem I'd say easily to 90+%....we did have a small handful of issues on those yrs we had a bad hurricane/tropical storm hitting us but that's a problem you ain't getting rid of when you live in an area with a high water table.

If your basement has high ceilings. I'd look into any system where you can install a raised floor cuz it's likely to always get wet during the worst storms. Gd luck!

 

I'm also considering whether I could install a concrete retaining wall in my basement. The sump and water softener sit in an 8 ft wide nook in one corner of the basement. We're planning to put up a wall to hide this things when we finish the basement. But what if the wall was cinder block, say 4' high with a 36" door opening. We'd use sand bags to block the door opening if the pump ever got overwhelmed, keeping the flooding to this relatively small area. Would this work?

 

Not if it's coming up through the floor, I don't think it would.

How's the grade pitching around the house?
How far do you downspouts release water from your foundation?

 

French drain around the entire foundation is your solution. We built a house at the base of a small mountain, the french drain runs to daylight at the lowest point of our property, there is water coming out of it 24/7/365. Wanted to finish half of the basement, waited a year to do so because of the same concerns you have. Basement has been bone dry, when the foundation was poured we had a sump hole installed just in case and that is dry as well.

 

For any passive drainage to work, you have to have a site that slopes sufficiently to have outlet. If the water is coming from underground, this is a challenge.

 

Just for clarification, the hydrostatic pressure can cause seepage through the floor, but its highly doubtful that it will be enough to run, or cause flooding. 90% of the water in cases like this, finds its way above the slab, where the slab meets the foundation wall, on top of the footer.

You really need to find where the sump discharge is, fix the grade, and make sure your downspout lines are discharged as far away as possible.

As far as the retaining wall goes, you'll have a hard time getting that to seal enough to be comfortable with.

I'd start outside...

 

That's a lot of water...

As others have mentioned slope of your yard, downspout length (I would do some looking into where yours are going) and find out where your sump pump is discharging as well.

I have full perimeter drainage set up inside my basement walls, 2 actually (2" pvc at 18" and 3.5" gutter track at 8") due to having an underground spring between mine and my neighbors house along the property line as well as having a deck behind my house which I don't believe has proper slope under it. I've never seen water coming in at the rate of which it appears you have though. What size is that black drain tile? It looks like it's doing some work with what appears to be pretty muddy water.

 

Are you at the bottom of a hill?

 

And as far as the downspout lines go, if they're corrugated, and your doing grade work already, I'd consider redoing them in smooth wall hard pipe. I always do them in sch 40.

 

Me? No.