This happened to us repeatedely our first year. The worst experience was in January 2005 when we had a warm front move through and dump about 2 inches of rain on us overnight. All of the snow melted, and since the ground was still frozen the water ran across our back yard and right into the basement. I believe we had about 16 inches of just above freezing water before a managed to get the pump rigged up.
Why is the water temperature important? Because I had to wade through it several times to get the pump in position and route the hose out of the window. Let me tell you, if you don’t have to wade through 34 degree water, don’t try it. Those guys that go swimming in January and say “Oh, it feels great!” I say yeah right, how can you feel anything after that. My feet felt like they were on fire when they started to warm up. After that I decided that it was time to take some proactive steps to reduce if not eliminate the basement water problem.
The first thing I did was to put gutters on the house. This was not a terribly hard thing to do, just time consuming. I made sure that each gutter had two exits, that way, if one downspout gets clogged, the water will run down the other downspout. Then I rented an excavator and dug trenches next to the house to install drainage pipes. The drainage pipes took the water away from the house about 15 feet on the down hill side. I made sure that they were pitched at least 1 inch in 5 feet. That made a difference, but we still had some flooding when we recieved a lot of rain.
The problem is that the back yard slopes down into the side and back of the house. The lot was not properly graded after the house was built, so this had been going on since, well 1965, when the house was constructed. So this spring I began to work on the grading. I dug our around the foundation and made a retaining wall with a swale behind it to direct water away from the house into a drainage pipe. That was all part of making a patio. Now the ground slopes away from the house in the back and runs to two surface drains I installed in the patio.
I also put in a basement sump. This was a straight forward, sledge hammer the basement floor one Saturday and make a hole large enough for a 5 gallon plastic pail. Naturally, things being what they are around here, I hit water under the basement floor. The hole began filling up and pretty soon the dirt inside of the hole colapsed. So more sledge hammering, make the hole bigger, I thought. I don’t know why that made sense, but it all worked out in the end. I cut the bottom out of the 5 gallon pail and drove it down into the sandy dirt. Then I was able to remove all of the dirt inside the pail without it filling up with water, sort of a coffer dam. I then filled in around the side of the pail with gravel and broken cement from the floor. I sealed the hole up around the pail with hydraulic cement. I installed a 1/2 horsepower wayne sump pump. The drainage pipe goes through the basement wall and connects up with the gutter drain pipes.
Finally, I installed a dehumidifier to remove what ever moisture there is in the air. This has helped out a great deal.
We still occasionally get a trickle of water in the far back corner when we get a lot of rain all at once, like labor day when it rained 2.5 inches. If that continues, I may look into those basement gutters to route the water to the sump pump.
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