On Friday 25 December 2015 18:06:27 Jon Elson wrote: > On 12/25/2015 03:59 PM, Gene Heskett wrote: > > No white Christmas here, steady rain, long enough my > > basement floor is getting wet. Darnit! I need to deepen > > the sump pump pit another 6 feet I guess. Or get a hoe in > > here with a 15 foot arm and put in a french drain that deep. > > The glue job I did on the two cracks in our basement is > still holding, and we've had enough rain on a couple > occasions that we would have had major puddles before the > fix. So, that is really good news! I've got stuff piled > all over the place, often in cardboard boxes, so flooded > floors really made a mess. > > Our last house had a foundation that leaked literally like a > sieve, there were thousands of leaks, no hope of ever fixing it. > > Jon > This basement is apparently built using 12" wide hatite? cement blocks. You are I imagine familiar with them. You can spray a garden hose on one side for 30 seconds, shut the hose off and walk to the other side of the wall and its wet enough to be running down the inside wall. But the bui,der knew it, so the outside, above the foundation, was given a coat of waterproofing tar. But 40 years later, the tar seems to have largely gone away, and water pressure has eroded lead pencil and larger holes all the way through within 3" of the floor. So anytime the water table (its all solid yellow clay backfill here & damned near water proof itself) gets above the floor level, it starts coming in because the blocks are lower resistance than the clay.
I blew a hole in the basement floor adjacent to the back wall, and sank a sump pit 30" deep last spring, and the sump pump is helping, but 2 things, I am pumping into the sewer (sick bird) by way of the laundry tub drain because getting a hose out to the gutter drains also subjects it to freezing temps most winters, and it obviously needs to be sunk another 5 or 6 feet just to keep the water table below the floor. The other thing is that the basement, except for the washer/dryer is on a single breaker, a 15 amp, and with the lights added in, is maxed out and the romex is running warm with two dehumidifiers, whatever else I may have running, and the sump pump, a 1/3rd horse all running at once. I am giving thought to buying another roll of 10-3w/g, and adding a separate 254 volt CT single phase circuit down there just to run the pump & all 3 dehumidifiers. But have you priced a 100' roll of 10-3w/g lately? Scary. We tipped a ground floor breaker earlier this week, reason unk, took everything in the kitchen & front room down. So I have got to do, or have done, something about this houses wiring. In 1975 when it was built, WV hadn't yet seen a copy of what would turn into the NEC, and enforcement is so riddled with grandfather clauses that one of them ought to be named Santa. The original service box, which is now a subcircuit off the 200 amp service I installed in 2007, has a 40 amp 2 pole main. Its a kludge I have bad dreams about when it was new! Humm, I just remembered that the OEM cookstove was electric, so there is a circuit thats now loaded only my the gas stoves ignition, clock and oven lights, plus I ran another duplex off that to plug in one of lifes basic requirements, a Mr. Coffee. If I can find that run in the basement, kill it & put in a 4 by j-box, there's the power I need for water control. Pay no attention to any bzzt's you hear. :) Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene> ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Emc-developers mailing list Emc-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-developers
