Homeowner's Blog » Weather

Every time I turn around, its raining

Paul — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:53:16 +0000

No really. I found this precipitation overlay on the National Weather Service web site this morning. This is the June 2009 rainfall amounts:

June 2009 rainfall, National Weather Service

We quite near those pink zones in the middle of the graphic, which is 10+ inches of rain. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it were more than that. I know there has been some local flooding and a few roads washed out around here.

That puts quite a damper on the outside work, as one might imagine. Last spring I tried to dig the footings for the solar photovoltaic system out by the garden. I went down about 2 1/2 feet and hit water. And that was after a dry spring. I can’t imagine what it would be like now.

I can say that the raised beds in the vegetable garden are really proving their worth now.

Update: Local newspaper reports June rainfall totals breaks 140 year record.

Basement not flooding

Paul — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:25:25 +0000

It is hard to take a picture of what is not there.

Since June 10th, we have received 5.38 inches of rain. That is quite a bit for a 9 day period. Our old basement would have looked like this:

flooded basement floor

That is a picture from two years ago before we had the basement french drains installed.

Today the basement looks like this:

basement after installation of interior french drain system

Which is to say, much better indeed. I also noticed that there are no wet spots on the walls, no active mold colonies, or any other features of wet basements.

I have also noted that the dehumidifier is used a lot less than it used to be. Last year, I only used it during July and August to keep the cold water pipes from sweating. This is saving use some significant money (my estimate is $580.00 per year, based on the Kill A Watt meter results) on our electric bill. That is all good.

In all fairness to American Dry Basement Systems (ADBS), the system that they installed works as advertised and it was worth the expense.

There is nothing as quiet as a snow storm

Paul — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 14:04:42 +0000

We are receiving more snow today, I have a feeling it is going to be a bad winter. I walked up to get the mail around 3pm yesterday and took a few pictures:

snow falling on white pine tree

All is calm as light snow falls on the White Pine tree.

The stream, known as the Salmus Kill, at the end of our road:

Salmas Kill in January

The back yard with the clothes line, unused since last September:

snow in the back yard

The field across the street. Normally, this field is cut in the fall, but this year it has been let go. The dried high grassy looking plants are reeds, they grow in wet lands and are a wet land marker.

snow falling on reeds

The street looking down the hill.

looking down our street

With the exception of the occasional snow plow, everything is very, very quiet.

But it does look nice

Paul — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 14:44:07 +0000

I know I am supposed to be indignant, perhaps even angry. It is, after all, April 15th and I should be getting ready to rototill the garden. But then there is indeed that new snow:

This is the view from our front door looking at the field across the street.

This is the view of the front of our house from the road. Notice the ugly yellow siding with several parts removed. We are going to get the house resided when we are finished with the new front porch and deck.

This is a white pine tree next to the back door.

This is the back patio area. Every once in a while, something comes along to remind me how beautiful the place where we live is.

Flooded Basement

Paul — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 14:20:42 +0000

I am fed up with this rain. I went outside this morning and shook my fist at the sky. We have had so much rain, water is now coming up, out of the floor drains in the basement. Fortunately, the sump pump was able to keep up with the incoming water, so the floor was only covered by about 1/4 inch or so. It is starting to dry out now. The unofficial rain gage reads 4.25 inches, since about midnight last night (about a twelve hour period).

We are having a little lull right now, but it is supposed to start raining again soon. Unfortunately, the rain came as all the leaves were falling, so every gutter and surface drain was clogged, which led to a large back yard puddle. I took opportunity to clean out the gutters before the rain returned. We are the definitely in a wet period, as we have had at least five instances of receiving over 4 inches of rain in a 24 hour period since August of 2005. The last one was in June, when several people in Sullivan county were killed because there house was washed away by creek.

The creek at the end of our road is flowing fast and furious. When I went to the store around 11 am, it was almost over the small bridge, it which point the town closes the road and we become marooned.

Basement Flooding

Paul — Mon, 11 Sep 2006 19:15:07 +0000

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.