Picture this – it’s a cold December night at the beach, where it’s pouring rain instead of snowing. In a perfect-storm-like series of events, first the sump pump protecting my crawl space (and therefore, my heater) fails. Then, so does my neighbor’s in the connecting crawl space. Over five inches of rain falls in the space of a few hours, saturating the already straining coastal water table and creating first a flood in my backyard (which is an all-too-regular occurrence ’round these parts), and then, a flood in my crawl space. 12 inches of water. Then 18. Then, goodbye heater.
Just before I realized how bad the crawl space was, I snapped this picture of the water in my yard
In a last ditch effort to find a stroke of luck and magically fix my problem, I crawled into the tiny crawl space, with my pajama pants tucked into my snow boots and a flashlight between my teeth. Soon, I was kneeling in 18 inches of cold, dirty water in the dark, shaking, praying and feeling around for where the sump pump might be. No luck. I was kicking myself for not paying closer attention during my home inspection and actually getting into the crawl space to see a) where the sump pump was located and b) what the heck a sump pump even looked like! That night, I didn’t even know how to spell sump pump – I thought it was “sum” pump. I was totally clueless, soaking wet, and miserable. And I had no heat.
I hunted around for the instruction manual to the sump pump, which I thought the previous owner had left me. Eureka! She had. I could tell from the cover what the pump should look like, but I knew I hadn’t seen anything like that in the crawl space. Then, I saw a clear warning – do NOT attempt to fix your sump pump while it is still plugged in. Ah yes, water and electricity aren’t such a good mix. I figured it was a lost cause, and then remembered that my dad should know where the sump pump was, at least, and maybe have some suggestions for me. So panicked and tearful, I called him at 12am, knowing that he wouldn’t likely get back to sleep that night. But I was at my wits end!
With no hardware stores open, the rain still coming down, and no sunlight, there was nothing we could do. My dad promised to drive the two hours south the next morning and suggested I get some sleep. After changing into warm and dry clothes, I first hovered by the crawl space to see if maybe, just maybe, the sump pump would kick in. Nope. Then, I hovered around my thermostat, watching the numbers slowly drop. I finally forced myself to go to bed for a couple of hours, afraid of what the morning might bring.
The next day was sunny and cold, as I headed back into the crawl space
Super Dad arrived early, and hit the hardware store to get a new sump pump and hoses. We set up the pump to get rid of the standing water, and I found out what a correctly working pump should look and sound like. Phew. A few hours later, the water had receeded but my heater was still a lost cause. I was scheduled to head up to my parents’ house the next day, so I scheduled the heater guy to come out when the water was gone and braced myself for an expensive afternoon. Since I would have a few days away, I bought a space heater to warm up my living room and watched miserably as the temperature continued to drop one degree at a time.
This is what I had been sloshing around in the previous night, but it had receded
It turned out I was one lucky girl though – despite the heater repairman quoting me some high priced replacements and discussing the possibility of moving the heater into my shed (which is where it should always have been in my opinion), after a few days, the heater dried itself out and was working again. Hallelujah!
I was very lucky - see the label on the heater in the background? The water had risen to halfway up that label.
The temporary sump pump and hoses would stay there until nicer weather would allow us to install a more permanent solution. Over the next few months, I would learn more than I ever wanted to know about sump pumps – every time it rained, I had to babysit the pump, which never seemed to start when it was supposed to. Eventually, we figured out that the pump wasn’t working well because of the sand and debris getting sucked into the pump, so I replaced it with another one. By this time, I was so neurotic about any water in my crawl space, that I continued to babysit the pump and start it up whenever I thought the level was too high (so basically any time it rained). I had no more heater incidents, and the summer months proved to be mostly crawl-space-flood free (though not backyard flood free).
My current sump pump (prior to final installation) does its job!
All of this taught me some extremely important lessons about homeownership:
1) Whether you are interested in electronics/appliances/anything-in-your-home or not, you should both know where it is and how it works. From the first day you live there. Even if you have someone else living with you and you think they know all about it, I think it’s Murphy’s Law that it WILL fail the one time they are not there and unreachable. Had I known about sump pumps, the location of mine and how it worked, I would have been able to tell much earlier that it had failed and may have avoided both the flood and the late night call to my poor dad. And had I known that my neighbor’s crawl space was connected to mine, I would have talked to him a lot sooner about keeping an eye on the flooding during that storm.
2) Don’t be afraid to ask questions. I didn’t want to seem stupid in front of my home inspector and my dad, so I didn’t ask them about sump pumps, or take him up on his offer to see where mine was. Which brings me to point 3…
3) Don’t be afraid to get dirty. If you’re afraid to get dirty early on, you will definitely get dirty later on. If I’d crawled into my scary, dirty crawl space on the day of my inspection, I would have known exactly where the sump pump was. But I didn’t want to get dirty (I was wearing white pants, so that was mistake number 2), so I didn’t bother. Which led directly to me kneeling in cold, dirty floodwater. I was dirty, wet and miserable anyway, but in much worse shape and almost out a heater.
4) Get the neighborhood gossip. This might sound funny, but especially in my neighborhood, everyone knows everyone else’s business (and yes, I hate that, but that’s a story for another post). But when I moved in, I learned fairly quickly that the previous owner of my home had recently had to replace the heater because of crawl-space flooding. That should have been clue #1 that it could happen again and was something I should know how to deal with. When your neighbors tell you homeownership stories, listen to them. It might save you later.
I’m now *almost* at the point where I can look back on that night and laugh (mostly because it only cost me the sump pump and some hoses and clamps, and not a new heater). But more than just being an anecdote in my tales of homeownership woe, it was a night of lessons for me, which I haven’t since taken for granted!
