Water in the Basement

The tenant came home one night to find water in her basement.

The first thing you do whenever there's water in your basement is look for the source (duh). In this case it appeared to be coming from the furnace or the condensation pump.

I took the furnace inspection panels off and looked all inside. No water there, so we focused more on the pump. We poured more water into the pump to see if it was working and it was.

Hmmm.

The best guess was with the exhaust pipe.

Notice where the pipe exits the foundation? It appears to be only a couple of inches above the ground. There's a standard distance the pipe should be above the ground for clearance of things like snow. Not meeting that standard, they put in a 90°, ran a vertical piece the standard, then added another 90°.

The nights previous to the water in the basement had been really cold (single digit cold). Our theory was the steam passing through the vertical piece during the cold quickly condensed and froze. When the temps warmed up, all that ice melted and ran back down to the pump overwhelming it.

Ok, so how do you fix that?

It turns out the "ground" beneath where the pipe exits isn't really the ground. It's a raised flower bed that robs the pipe of the clearance it should have. In the spring the plan is to dig out that part of the flower bed so the pipe can horizontally run out of the foundation at the proper height. That should cure the condensation problem of the vertical pipe on really cold nights and remove two 90°s, thus increasing flow.

At least that's the theory.

- b