Adventures in Below Ground Plumbing - The Lift Pump
source link: https://fuzzyblog.io/blog/home_ownership/2020/04/28/adventures-in-below-ground-plumbing-the-lift-pump.html
Go to the source link to view the article. You can view the picture content, updated content and better typesetting reading experience. If the link is broken, please click the button below to view the snapshot at that time.
Adventures in Below Ground Plumbing - The Lift Pump
Apr 28, 2020
I've now owned a few different homes over the years but my current home is the first one with a bathroom that is below ground level (in a finished basement). When you have a bathroom below ground level then your plumbing subsystem has to have a "lift pump". A lift pump system consists of:
- A sump in the floor where sewage (water / the other stuff) collects
- A pump that lifts the sewage up to the ground level where it can flow into the street level outflow
Note: A lift pump has a duty cycle of 8 to 10 years. A lift pump has a replacement price of approximately $1,500 so these things are expensive.
Things You Can't Flush with a Lift Pump
You can't flush:
- Kitty Litter
- Flushable Wipes
How to Know When You Have a Problem with your Lift Pump
Here are three symptoms of failure:
- Smell. A bad lift pump reveals itself with a fairly rank odor in the lower region of the house centered around the machinery room where the lift pump is located.
- Leakage. Leakage from the sealed sump where the lift pump is located.
- Noise. Many lift pump systems will have an alarm on them that beeps when there is an issue.
Two Ways to Fix a Difficult Lift Pump
There are at least two failure symptoms with a lift pump:
- Pump doesn't work at all (no noise when you power cycle it)
- Pump works but you can't flush a toilet / have water backup / sump leakage
Here are two approaches to fixing the second:
- Turn it off and let it sit for a number of days. Just as a clogged toilet will magically "fix" itself when left alone, so too will a lift pump that is clogged. The blockage often dissolves.
- Lift the Vertical Pipe up and down and "shake" it. The lift pump itself is directly coupled to the vertical pipe and if you lift it up and down / shaking it, you can often dislodge the blockage.
Thank You
I learned all of this from David, a technician at Benjamin Franklin Plumbing who serviced my house today. The $49 for the service call for him to tell me this much was much, much preferable to the $1500 fee for a new lift pump.
Posted In: #home_ownership #plumbing
Recommend
-
18
__ .----.-----.--------.-----.| |_.-----.--------.-----.-----. | _| -__| | _ || _| -__| | _ | -__| |__| |_____|__|__|__|_____||____|_____|__|__|__...
-
5
Forget the games, I want to create some plumbing Some people get computers and write games. I always tended to write utilities. I didn't think this was too unusual until I looked back at some programming which happened in a nont...
-
7
Plumbing data with derived state in Compose Jun 15 ・19 min read ...
-
4
5309 members Technology Technology on Digg: the best articles, videos, tweets, and original content that the web is talking a...
-
2
Z for superface...
-
7
Home ...
-
1
These boots were made for plumbing / Mario’s boots now exist in the real world, and they actually look kind of nice?By Jay...
-
6
Inspiration 25 Plumbing Websites: Examples for Inspiration By
-
2
judging a civilization by its toilets — Plumbing discovery reveals the rise and fall of the Roman Empire Ancient lead pollution in a Roman harbor shows the city’s fortunes...
-
5
How the US is Pushing China Out of the Internet's Plumbing Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at
About Joyk
Aggregate valuable and interesting links.
Joyk means Joy of geeK