Opinion: Water in sump hole is real first sign of spring

Talk about it

Spring has arrived.

Never mind your calendar.

Never mind that we’re only two days removed from an overnight low temperature of 5 below zero.

Never mind that we have 10 inches of snowpack.

Just trust me. Spring has arrived.

How do I know this? It’s simple: There is water in the sump hole at my house.

I was made aware of that reality just after 2 a.m. Wednesday, when our preschool-aged daughter’s latest bout of restlessness turned out to be fortuitous. My wife got up to calm our daughter, and I fell back asleep in about 10 seconds flat (I’ll admit that’s a typical response, but I do my part sometimes — really, I do).

Perhaps a minute or so later, my wife walked backed into our bedroom and called my name. Following my usual practice when that happens, I bolted upright and awake in bed wondering who I was, where I was, what time it was and what calamity I was about to stumble into.

“What’s that noise?” my wife asked.

A strange noise in the middle of the night — if ever there was a husbandly duty, this was it. It was time for the man of the house to spring into action.

Then came my wife’s second question.

“Is it the furnace?”

Tuning my ear to the low humming sound, and not yet getting out of bed, I offered my expert opinion: “Maybe.”

I then got up and went downstairs with my wife trailing me. Since “furnace” was still the only word to pierce my foggy consciousness, I turned on the light in the room containing the furnace and stared dumbly at the machine. It was not making any noise.

“It’s the sump pump,” my wife called from another room.

I’m convinced I would have figured that out eventually. A guy needs a chance to wake up first, doesn’t he?

Anyway, I joined my wife and confirmed her diagnosis.

“You’re right,” I said. “It’s the sump pump.”

Apparently, and much to my surprise, the recent warm spell must have taken enough frost out of the ground for me to be dealing with a potential basement flood at 2 a.m. on Feb. 23, a full 25 days before the official first day of spring.

Once again, a husbandly task was before me. Somebody was going to have to get down on the floor and poke around in that sump hole, and that someone was not going to be my wife.

The water level in the hole was above the pump, but not alarmingly high. I knew the pump’s float mechanism was working, because the pump was running. That explained the loud humming noise my wife heard from upstairs.

Though the pump was running, no water was leaving the hole. I groaned and flashed back to the two previous times in the past few years when we’ve had water problems in our basement. Both times, the sump hole filled and overflowed after the pump quit working. We were away from home the first time and asleep the second. Both instances resulted in wet carpet and all the fun of furniture-moving and Shop-Vac-operating that goes with it (I should add that on both occasions, a neighbor of ours was incredibly helpful, which is one of the true joys of living in a place as small as Mitchell).

Upon the discovery of each of those earlier floods, I stuck my arm down the sump hole and pulled up the float on the pump. Both times, the pump kicked to life and pumped all the water out of the hole. I have been continually confounded as to how a working sump pump could suddenly stop working at the one time of year when it’s really needed, but I always suspected that since the first instance occurred in late winter/early spring, perhaps some water had frozen in the hose outside and blocked the flow of water being pumped up from the basement. I figured the pump probably fought bravely against the blockage for minutes or even hours before finally giving up.

Wednesday morning brought an opportunity to test my theory. My first course of action was to trudge outside with a shovel and clear all the snow off the sump hose. Maybe the hose was pinched somewhere along its length or plugged at the end, I thought. No such luck.

Next, I picked up a section of hose near the house. Sure enough, there was a chunk of ice in there. I went back inside and mentioned this to my wife, who was planted on the couch under a blanket. She immediately suggested that I remove the hose from its connection to the house and pour hot water down the hose to thaw the ice.

Again, I’m sure I would have thought of that eventually. This was about 2:30 a.m., mind you, and I was still a bit groggy. Anyway, it didn’t work.

What I needed, I figured, was some sort of pole to stick down the hose and push out the ice. My wife fetched a broomstick, but that didn’t work, either. The ice wouldn’t budge. (I need to insert a question here: Why do they put grooves in sump hoses? It seems to me that they only serve to anchor the ice more firmly.)

My wife then suggested we pump some water without the hose attached, just to make sure the pump was working. It was. Next, knowing we had two connected sections of sump hose, she suggested that I take the section of hose farthest from the house, which had no ice in it, and attach it to the house in order to pump the rest of the water as far away from the house as possible.

Have I mentioned that my mind was working a little slowly at that insufferable hour? Again, I’m sure I would have thought of all this eventually, and I was at least able to contribute my labor to the job.

With the crisis averted, we’re now on high alert, ever mindful of the possibility of our basement flooding again.

Ah, springtime. Ain’t it grand?

Tags: seth tupper, opinion, columns, updates