How To Install A Sump Pump Pit

hi I'm Shannon from host improvements.com and today I want to show you how to uh install a sump pit in your basement so uh maybe you've got a bit of a high water table or you're having a problem with moisture in your basement and you've decided that you're going to put a sump P it because you don't have one uh basically you know that's what we want to show you today this is the the plastic pre-made pit that we're going to put in so it's just a big plastic bucket basically with a lid that snaps on and and then there's access here for your pump or your lines to come out so this pit here is approximately I think it's about 2 ft deep and it's about 2 ft across actually it might be close to 30 in deep so uh obviously before we can install that we need to first of all decide where we want it Mark out the concrete cut the concrete Jackhammer it out and dig the hole so so there's a fair bit of work involved before you can even worry about putting the pit in uh in our case today we're actually relocating an existing SP so I've already done some of the cutting the old sump pit was right here uh which was going to end up being in the corner of a bed or of a room in the basement and they didn't want it there obviously so we're just moving it over here a little bit to the other side of the wall in this case they've got I'm not even sure if you can see it but there is a weeping towel coming in under the footing into this sump pit so we need to connect another extension onto that and then it'll come through a trench here and then cut into the side of the the pale into this hole okay and then the pump and everything will go in it so so this video is strictly on you know Excavating this hole and getting that pit set and in the hole so so as I said I did do some of the cutting already so basically what I'm trying to do is cut cut down about 2 in or so just kind of a perimeter of the of uh the area I want to excavate uh this will just make a nice clean Edge for when we Rec Concrete in the the surface again so we cut that chip it out with a jackhammer uh we had this smaller one here and uh the concrete here is particularly hard so I think we're going to probably go to a bigger Jackhammer just to speed things up a bit but uh typically this Hammer probably would do what you need it to do your first little chunk that you break out with a jackhammer is always tougher than than once you get that hole out there and there's room for the pieces to fall into but uh uh we are going to get a bigger one I think to finish the show the video so you can see I cut the perimeter what I basically did I'm using my uh using an old circular saw with a diamond concrete cutting bid in it uh we're going to use a a vacuum to help control some of the dust and a bit of water uh obviously you need to be careful we're mixing water with electrical tool so you don't don't get too crazy dumping it all over the place and end up shocking yourself um now the size of the opening here like I said this pits about 24 in across I allow it about 30 in just to give us a little more room to dig we've got to dig fairly deep so you want to you want a little extra room to work uh if you were cutting this concrete with a grinder you could probably cut a round circle if you wanted to you know whatever whatever you want to do but in this case I just cut it sort of rectangular sort of squarish and uh that should do the trick so uh you're going to need uh you know eye protection hearing protection for sure like I said we're going to run a shop vac to try to control some of the Dust uh you may want a dust mask though as well so we're just going to continue on just finish off this little piece here that we haven't cut so far and uh it'll just take me one second to get the vacuum and couple things into place and then we'll be ready to cut [Music] so you can see uh now when I plunged in with the saw back here to start the cut I already had it started so it looked like it just dropped in like nothing but it will take a little bit of work to get your first start to the uh cut uh you could see I think probably in the video how the vacuum does a good pretty good job of controlling most of the Dust you still get some Airborne you know you can set a fan up in a window or something too to try to suck some of the the extra out uh and then just splashing a bit of water along on here helps also again to settle the dust and uh also cools the blade and and assists in The Cutting process a little bit as well so so we've got our cut all made I'm going to uh squeegee some of this excess water just off into the sump pit for now and uh then we're going to get the bigger hammer and start chipping this out Okay so we've uh switched out for a little bigger uh little bigger um Jackhammer here there is a one bigger than this yet that's still electric but I'm pretty sure this one will do it um now you can see we've already started here basically I'll just give you a bit of a rundown on how to use one of these in case you never have um generally speaking if you can start near an edge or a corner is usually better and you know if you're cutting like this you want to start a couple inches away with the tip so that you don't damage this and uh the idea is try to get a a hole broke out and and cleaned out a little bit so that then when you start hammering back here you know you usually come back a couple inches from the edge and you know right here I'd be putting the point and start and you're trying to break pieces off and now that this is emptied out the pieces kind of have somewhere to go and it it works a lot easier from this point once you have a bit of a hole started yeah those are the main things it's obviously going to be loud uh you don't for for most jackhammers the weight of the Jackhammer really does the work you know leaning all your weight on it sometimes is actually uh inhibiting it to work properly you need a little bit of weight on it and you're going to need to pry on a little bit sometimes but for the most part just let the the hammer do its work I'm going to have the uh wet dry back running and that'll suck up some of the Dust uh and also I'll be putting some of the rubble into pales because we've got to paale it out of here and and get rid of it so uh uh basically I'm just going to work my way through here and we're probably going to speed up the majority of it because obviously you don't need to see all the see me just sweating my butt off working here so so you well you'll uh see the first little bit here and then we'll likely speed it up so get on my safety gear and go ahead I've just got the gloves on just uh cuz pulling out the pieces and that it's kind of hard on the hands so this particular Jackhammer just has a slide switch some of them have a trigger this one's just a slide and uh I should actually I should just speak about the bits too so the bits here come in and out by sliding this there's usually a collar on here and you'll have either a chisel bit or one that'll come to a point usually and usually the Chisel is going to give you the most bang for your buck okay here we go [Music] [Music] so you can see that uh we've just about got all the concrete broke out now uh this was about probably a little bit over an hour is worth of work to get it broke out we probably got another 20 minutes here by the time we have the the bigger Rubble cleaned up and hauled out we've been just using some uh old 5 gallon buckets filling them about half or 3/4 full or whatever you can easily carry you don't want to hurt yourself uh we've got to carry it upstairs and outside so we're going you know not right full and you can tell I'm out of breath so we're just going to get this Rubble out of here and then we can start digging down and uh we're going to basically save most of this fill onto a tarp and reuse it a lot of it around the uh around the new pit and stuff itself um one thing that uh it's probably worth mentioning is before you start a project like this there's a few things you should consider about uh in the area that you're going to uh cut the concrete or start digging one thing is if you have INF floor heat like that's hydronic heating system inside your concrete obviously you cannot do this job you're going to end up cutting a pipe for sure so don't don't even consider it um another thing to think about is where all your plumbing is coming and going from in the basement because it will be uh below here and sometimes it can be quite shallow just below the floor so that's your uh any kind of drains from the uh say the bathroom uh Plumbing uh your main sewer going out although it should be pretty deep you shouldn't shouldn't have to worry about it uh and uh the main thing would be your main water line coming in so uh if you kind of know where your water meter is in the house and you know basically where it comes in from outside then usually it's straight away from there so make sure you're nowhere near that area cuz that that one uh can flood your house pretty quickly before you get the city there to shut it off so so you think about all those things before you start this kind of project but if you if you know you're out of the way of any of that stuff and you're good to go then uh you'll break up your concrete and start digging okay so uh now we've got all the main concrete out of the way we can dig this hole down remember we're we got to dig a big enough hole to sink this Barrel into so uh it's going to be a fair bit of digging uh we're going to need some some of that what we get out of here some of the best stuff which will be the gravels and stuff that are on top to fill back in around it so I'm saving that onto this tarp to reuse it and uh if we get down to some clay or whatever I'm going to try not to reuse most of that so it'll get in the buckets and hauled out again so pretty basic we're just uh just going to be shoveling here for a while to get rid of this stuff here so we have a hole put that pit in pretty basic straightforward just keep digging actually got a nice amount of gravel in there it's good okay so I've got all the digging done um you can see this massive crater that I've created here and you can see there's already some uh ground water just seeping back into it uh that hole has been dug for about half an hour or so uh you can also see that I've got this extension for the weeping tile in in our scenario and it's just simply slit both both the weeping tile coming into the house and this extension are just slit and the two are just slid over each other uh preferably this one slid over top of the other one to help keep directing the water this way this trench was created here with just ever so slight a little bit of little bit lower at this end than it is here so the water will naturally flow to this to the bucket so uh for the most part all the digging I just did with a shovel you can see I have quite a mass of of back fill here some clay and some gravel uh most most part did with the shovel I did bring this uh post hole digger here uh in the end I didn't need it I had enough room to work so I didn't worry about that so we've got that all in I've got my uh side of my bucket cut open and that's just determined by the elevation of the uh pipe so I've got that cut that isn't a tight fit the pipe easily slides through there with room to spare so um so basically it's just a matter of putting your bucket Down in the Hole redirecting your your pipe into it like that uh now when I was digging the hole I just used a straight edge I wasn't really going for level I'm just using this as a straight edge you know going from floor to floor from concrete to concrete and getting the bucket I don't want it standing up so like above the floor if anything I want it down just a bit and I'm probably oh a quar inch lower than the concrete here so it's just a matter of getting the bucket sitting in there so that the straight edge isn't riding up on it sometimes just stepping down in here we'll just settle it down into that hole a little bit okay so there's no real science to that just get it down below the surface of the floor and uh once you've got your pipe all in there just be sure it's laying down nicely you don't have a big hump in the middle or anything uh we'll just make sure we put some weight on this when we start our back fill to keep that Center down it's sticking into the into the pit itself you know an inch and a half or whatever and uh we're pretty much pretty much ready to just back fill that so I'm going to put a little bit of clay our our extension of our weeping tiwel doesn't have any grooves in it it's a solid pipe so uh we can put clay right on it we don't have to worry that the ground water is going to weep dirt into that so so we put some clay here we'll try to get some sand in some gravel back in around the the little bit of space that's between the this liner and and the hole we dug and uh you know a little bit of clay a little bit of gravel get it up to grade where we want our concrete and then we're ready to go okay so like I said before we're going to back fill over the pipe mostly with h clay we're going to use some sand around that little Gap around the bucket around the uh liner I did take a big pale of clay just a 5 gallon paale and set it down in that liner just to hold it in place so it isn't moving around while we're doing any back filling so we'll just get some of this in here that's right I wanted to stand on there too once you have some weight on there it basically holds that [Music] down okay I just want to get some gravel around there around that pit [Music] okay so that just kind of gets our pit sitting stable so it's not uh shifting around in that hole on us and we'll use a little bit of this clay to take up some of the [Music] bulk so once I've got the clay kind of roughly in there I just want to pack it down get it settled down clay isn't the best back fill material but uh here we're not structurally really holding anything so I'm just using this wood to basically just pack that down in there okay so we finished our back filling we got got the uh gravel in there we tamped it down with the board and then I walked around in there just to pack it down that much more uh swept the the area around us here just to get rid of any stones that are up on the concrete uh more than anything just keep from kneeling on them that sort of thing um I also ran the broom around just on the Inside Edge here you know there's some little lips and stuff cuz this isn't going to be perfect and just swept off any sand or gravel that was up on there too so we get a little bit of bond there um I'm just mixing the bagged kind of premixed concrete for this little job and I probably only mix about a third of a bag at a time cuz I'm just mixing it by hand in this pale but basically just going to mix it dump it in there we'll prod it in nice with the Trel and uh you know then work our way around but we'll we'll get ourself worked a fair ways from that side there before we start tring or doing too much messing around so just mix it as your uh as the instructions tell you to for the [Music] [Applause] manufacturer it's not the easiest to mix it just in a pale but for this little bit that we're doing I'm just using a little paddle to try to make sure I'm mixing right down to the [Applause] bottom it's not quick real quick setting or anything it sets relatively quick but it's not like I've got to be in a huge Panic here [Applause] just trying to get mix straight down to the bottom I probably put a little more than I should have in here to start [Applause] with okay this Bouch is a little runny cuz I added a little more water to it than I really wanted to but I don't know if I mentioned uh we're basically trying to leave about three inches of concrete around there uh we didn't do any uh rebar dowels or anything but you could dowel in rebar if you wanted to uh a lot of this floor is in this section here is barely 2 in so uh if I try to re dowel anything in there it's probably just going to break off anyway so so we're just pouring it around there it'll kind of run where it needs to run and like I said we'll uh do some tring here after a bit [Applause] on so already setting up a little bit over here I'm just kind of basically vibrating it down into there it's kind of hard to deal with a little little area like this just go around and basically slope it to whatever your kits at okay so you're just kind of in my case like I said before my Pit's about a/4 inch low so it just creates a little bit of a gradual slope back to it I'm just kind of oh my weeping tile's already uh letting some water in there so [Music] just kind of working it a little bit kind of gets the air out of it that might be trapped in there I'm just using a magnesium float for this part probably was a little bit runnier than it really needed to [Music] be okay I need a little bit more to finish off there oops okay so a little bit more just to finish this area off here you can see my uh pit is just a little bit offset that way from the center of the hole so got a little bit more width over here on the concrete you'll get once this dries you'll actually get a little bit of shrinkage and you'll probably get a bit of a crack around the perimeter from the old pad if it's in a if it's in a floor where you want to uh you know maybe you're putting some vinyl or something like that once this cures then you might want to go over it with some self-leveling cement just to kind of smooth it out anywhere where it shrunk so with the mag we're not trying to get it perfect but trying to get it pretty close and uh we'll use a steel Trel on it once it sets up a little bit more needs a little bit of time yet so I'll just keep filling in this trench uh with the concrete and then we'll come back to this okay so once the uh concrete has set up a little bit further uh we're going to use a steel Trel on it we used the Magnesium float before and that's basically just to get it pretty much into place it helps pull up some of the fines to the top and then the steel Trel once uh once your bleed Waters have kind of come off the concrete you know the the moisture that bleeds through then you can should be ready to Trel it and this will just give it a little smoother finish close in any uh this is actually still a little bit wet so we're just kind of flattening it out with this and you can see how it makes a smoother finish than what we've got over there that we did with the Magnesium Trail a little hard on a small area like this when we've poured it in different batches one's drier one's wetter than the other so it's all setting up just a little bit differently but I'm just going to go around this main pit area I know down there it's not going to be ready for the steel uh because it was uh poured later but I'll just go around here [Applause] a little bit tricky in such a small little area here but and uh also before I did this I went around around the edges and just kind of cleaned up any of this little bit of paste that's around the edge sometimes there's a rock in there so I just clean it up with the edge of this before I get to there okay that's about as far as I can go over there we just kind of work that edge in As Good As we can it's not the easiest thing to do when you're coming up against a cut so that's pretty much uh really is the wrap for that this video uh we will be doing a uh separate video on actually installing the sump pump so you'll want to check that out as well uh we're it's actually going to be a 120 volt with a 12volt backup so look for that um this is all basically complete the concrete just has to set up though and and that before we can do the pump so so hopefully hopefully this worked out all right and gave you enough information to maybe install your own sump pit and uh you kind of know what tools you're going to need and what supplies you're going to need as well so if there's any other questions you have about this just go to our Forum on the website check us out there and uh post up any questions you have you can uh follow along with us on Twitter and Facebook and also uh you might want to check us out on our uh patreon as well so uh good luck with your project and uh we'll see you next time

Channel: HouseImprovements

Views: 794,991

Keywords: basement, sump, pump, pit, diy, install, how-to, dig, concrete, remove, hole, dirt, cement, floor, flooring, drain, water, home, house, reno, fix, repair, seep, seepage, weeping, tile, drainage, table

Id: BamCDB28oCc

Length: 27min 32sec (1652 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 24 2016