A Pleasant Surprise

Any time you take on a project to do something for the first time there are going to be surprises, most of them unpleasant.  Overall, my drainage project has been no exception, but yesterday was different.

Yesterday I decided that it was time to remove the old sump pump from the hole.

The sump pump is inside a barrel of sorts that is about the size of a big trash can.  I cut away the PVC pipes connected to the top of the barrel, removed the bolts holding the top to the barrel, and removed the top.  I could then reach into the barrel and remove the pump.

The barrel was sitting in about a foot and a half of water in the hole.  I pumped most of the water out of the hole so that I could dig the barrel out.  The bottom of the barrel was about two feet below the bottom of the hole.  I was faced with the prospect of making the hole about two feet deeper around the barrel in order to remove the barrel.

Digging, in general, is not much fun.  Digging mud is immensely worse.  The water soaked muck is heavy and tends splatter over everything.  There was no place to stand except in the hole, on the muddy bottom.  My shoes sank an inch or so into the mud.  After a bit of digging around the barrel, I decided to take a break.

When I returned, barrel had popped up and was resting on its side at the bottom of the hole.

The water pressure in the muck surrounding the barrel was evidently great enough to push the barrel up like a cork. 

 After pumping some water out of the barrel, I could simply reach down and pick it up.

Hole: Progress Report

I started this project about a month ago, and posted this early photo on Facebook.  The Hole

The original plan was to create a catch basin in the form of a cube 5 feet on each side, with concrete sides and bottom.  I wanted to provide a convenient means of access, for inspection and repair (unlike the old system, which had to be dug up for access.)  But I wanted to replace the brick pavers that you see stacked up beside the house.  

I dug the hole deeper and removed the PVC pipes that were part of a sprinkler system that we no longer used.

But about this time in early July we started having a lot of rain.  Good news: The hole did its job of protecting the living room from water.  Despite some of the heaviest rain in years, no water came into the house from the patio.  Bad news: the hole accumulates a lot of water every time it rains, which is almost every day, making it inconvenient to do more digging.

I did notice that after a day or so without more rain, most of the water soaked into the ground.  The idea occurred to me that maybe I don't need a sump pump in the catch basin.  Just leave the bottom of the hole unsealed and let the water soak into the ground.  With no pump, I don't need to worry about access for maintenance and repair, a big plus.  I could just install the grating for water to flow into the hole and put a permanent cover over the rest of it and replace the patio bricks.

During a pause between the rains, I bailed the water out of the hole by hand, and dug the hole deeper, starting to think about building the concrete walls.

Even though I had deleted the automatic electric sump pump from the plan, I thought I should have a gasoline powered pump to use in the case of a hurricane. A really heavy downpour, say 10 or 12 inches in a few hours, would probably fill the catch basin before the water could soak into the ground.  Even when I expected to have the electric pump, I thought I should have a gasoline powered pump as backup in case of a power failure.

The gasoline powered pump would have to be operated manually.  But it would be above ground, and would not be the maintenance headache that an electrical pump in the hole would be.  So I started looking at gasoline powered pumps.

Yesterday morning (Sat. July 27) I bought a gasoline powered pump at Northern Tool.

It took a certain amount of fumbling around to get the pump to work, but by early afternoon I had removed most of the water from the hole.  

By late afternoon it was back, even through there had been no rain.  Evidently the water table is about three feet below the surface in my back yard right now and I had now dug the hole deeper than that.  So rather than seeping out, water was seeping into the hole.  The idea of a five foot deep hole now seems like a really bad idea.  Especially if the intent is for collected rainwater to seep into the ground at the bottom of the hole.

So replan!  Plan C  (or maybe it's Plan D, I've lost track.)  is to make the catch basin longer and shallower.  Say 5' x 10' x 3'  vs. the original 5' x 5' x 5'.  That means pulling up more bricks from the patio.  (Expanding in the other direction is not feasible because there is a tree nearby.).

Today's task was to remove the bricks from a 4' x 7' strip of the patio.

It now occurs to me that I could extend the catch basin a few feet further and provide an access hole without having to deal with the patio bricks.  I could put an electric sump pump at this end, with a simple metal cover on the access hole.  And it would be right in line with the underground pipe that goes out to the street, which was installed for the old system.  
Plan E.