The Best Sump Pump? - An Engineers Review

today I want to talk about some pumps talking about some pumps on a permaculture Channel might seem a little bit strange but you'd be amazed at how often I work with clients and even ironically in her own family cabin around some pumps so a couple of things today specifically I'm going to be putting a new sump pump into our family cabin because the old one is finally bit the dust now I have gone out and bought the best sump pump on the market so that this does not happen again for a very very long time but I thought it would be a great opportunity to talk about why I hate sump pumps so much and specifically the lack of design that goes into modern-day homes so a lot of times when we're talking about design and permaculture and all that stuff we have this mantra that goes something like this water access and structures so basically what we're saying there is that we designed the water systems on a property first then we figure out how to get access to the property because water is a master element basically all elements on the property either wanted or benefit from water or are damaged by water so you can think about access access is basically roads roads don't really want to be in the middle of water courses in fact roads want to shed water they're kind of like roofs structures are the same thing structures don't really want to be in water courses they want to be on dry land in addition structures need to take into account what's going on above the surface from a water perspective but also what's going on below the surface now present day design pretty much just ignores the natural functions of an ecosystem or the ecological services and in fact when Humanity decide that they don't like an ecological surface then they call it a liability and so most present-day design focuses around the shaping of land to concentrate and dispose of water and they do this because it's cheaper to shaped land with massive bulldozers and earth shaping equipment or it's more profitable I should say than the cost effective because the cost per unit house placed into an area far outstrips the cost of earth shaping it to force function and ecosystem to function in a specific way and so we end up with houses placed in locations that should not be there and as a result we end up with basements that are in water tables that are really high and in order to accommodate for these high water tables we put some pumps in it now most people don't realize this but a basement even though it is super thick like walls in a basement can be six to ten inches thick depending on how deep they go basements are basically concrete boats if you don't evacuate the water underneath the basement one of two things can happen either the house will start to float or the foundation will essentially crack due to hydraulic pressure and the basement will flood now I have been around many many flooded basements I mean we've had the floods of 2013 in Calgary this cabin in particular has almost flooded at least half a dozen times and luckily I've been around to hook up generators and pumps and all sorts of crazy solutions to stop it from actually happening and the flooded basement can cause all sorts of problems you can get toxic mold you can end up having to replace the entire basement which can be 40 50 $100,000 to do so you end up having increased insurance premiums I mean the liabilities are just endless if you're in the middle of designing a house I highly recommend you consider designing a slab on grade house so you don't ever have to have a sump pump if you insist on having a basement however I recommend you do some significant tests on the property to see how high the water table actually gets because if you've got a high water table you should either get rid of the property because if the basement is more important than the actual location then you should find a property that will allow you to have a basement or you should just change the design so you don't have to have a pump that constantly goes off this pump that I'm sitting beside right now in the springtime literally goes off every five minutes and it'll do that for most of the summer finally slowing down once the ground freezes in the winter time and the water stops coming in and so this in permaculture is what we call a type 1 error it's such a type 1 error that we actually have to have a sump pump with a battery backup so there's actually two pumps in the hole one in the event that the grid goes down which is the battery-powered one and one that functions while the grid is up however because the flow of water is so significant in the spring time standard 700 amp battery only lasts between 6 and 10 hours depending on the rate of pumping with how much water it's actually pumping out and so we've actually had to install a generator onto the building as well in order to have a grid backup so now we have a generator for the grid backup which will allow the pump to actually operate in the event of a grid outage so we've got our own kind of Island if you will our own grid and then we have a backup pump in the event that the generator and the grid dies and also the backup will also act as a secondary pump in the event that the main pump dies so we've got one two three four layers of redundancy in order to ensure that this basement doesn't flood so as you can see it gets a little bit crazy when you start having to add all of these layers of redundancy and very expensive I should add to put all these layers in so this pump system that I just bought which I'm going to show you here in a second was actually $1,000 now if you have a plumber install it instead of yourself that's probably gonna add another five six hundred dollars so you're looking at a sixteen hundred dollar investment every five to ten years to replace this pump the generator outside is around ten thousand dollars and then you've got to manage all the water that comes out of the ground once you bring to the surface you've got to figure out where you can put it all not to mention you're actually trying to drain the subsoils or the ground water which is almost an impossible task to do so hopefully you're getting the sense as to why I'm not a big fan of sump pumps and why you should do a lot of diligence before you make that decision to build a basement on a place with high water table now this house was built in a place that didn't look like it had high water tables and after three or four years of increased rainfall which apparently is pretty normal around here we get these cyclical rain systems so we'll get really wet five years and then it'll be really dry for five years sort of thing I'm not sure the exact cycle is so when they when this house was built the ground water table was pretty low and it didn't look like sump pump was good to be needed and so it's good to go talk to the locals and find out information about what's going on with the ground table and if it seasonally goes up and down that's the first thing the second thing to consider is that if the locals don't know anything about the ground water you can actually do test pits around the house and you can do soil structure tests and look at the physical characteristics of the soils and subsoils and there's actually this thing called soil modeling that you can not not model as in supermodel but Maat Maat ole mot and it'll tell you whether there's seasonal inundation of groundwater so there's lots of little patterns that you can look for to tell you whether or not you're going to have seasonal inundation of water and that should give you clues with regards to how you build your septic system whether or not you build a basement and anything else related to water infrastructure or water opportunities and liabilities on the property lastly if you are insistent on building a basement the only real basements that make sense to me e-even in areas with high groundwater tables are walkouts and the reason that I really like walkout basements if you're gonna build a basement is because a walkout basement has what we call relief which basically means that the foundation has the ability to evacuate the water around it without the use of a pump pumps are mechanical they're gonna fail generators are mechanical they're gonna fail grids also have lots of moving parts and eventually they will fail as well even if it's just for a short period of time and so wherever possible you want to build your infrastructure around things that are not gonna fail another word solid-state so when we put weeping tile which is a type of drainage pipe around the foundation of a building it is no moving parts it just collects water and it evacuates it so if you're going to end up putting in a walkout basement that has weeping tile and it's going to be evacuating water around your foundation then try and find some functions that you can use that water for put it to productive use put it into a rain garden put it into a pond don't just let it go water is one of the most valuable resources that we have on this planet it allows us to grow plants it allows us to sequester carbon it allows us to grow our own food fiber fuel etc etc etc so don't waste the water so now I'm going to show you this pump and why it's pretty awesome as some pumps go and how it works and then I'm gonna go and install it I'm not going to show you the installation it's pretty standard but I just wanted to show you the specific sump pump so if you're looking for a sump pump something that's bulletproof pretty much the best on the market this is the one I've pretty much been told by insurance companies as well as the local plumbing outfit that I bought it from that if you tell your insurance company you have one of these systems in your house you'll actually get a rebate because they are such amazing pumps so here it is so this is the solar pump and this is the 110 volt grids grid-tied pump right here it's actually got a vortex pump on it which means that it's a centrifugal pump that where the rotor actually sits independent of the inlet and outlet so that if you do end up having any debris go through the pump it's not going to get caught up in the rotor that's what a vortex pump is apparently this is the best switch on the market so you can hear it switching here and it only actually will pump out about seven and a quarter inches of water I measured it with a tape measure whereas some sump pumps have these massive wires with float switches that float up and down this one has a standard kind of stationary float right here the reason that this is a little better than the wire based ones or the floating float switches is that those floating float switches in several occasions have actually got tangled up and then they stopped working or the pump stays running in it and it burns out which is maybe what actually happened to the pumps in there because I've noticed that they've stopped operating luckily outside of the wet season so this also has a secondary port right here and another float switch right here there's the there's the click right there so this is the secondary pump switch which then hooks in to this guy right here so that goes in right there okay and this is a DC pump so this DC pump is going to be a little bit smaller so it's not going to have quite the capacity and it's going to be hooked up to a deep cycle battery over here and this will give anywhere from 6 to 10 hours of pumping capacity so that a little microprocessor on there so that it can keep the thing properly charged and so that gives us our second level of redundancy now something to notice about all these pumps they all have integrated check valves so they won't back flood each other so when this pump is running if the 12-volt DC pump over here is not running it's not going to end up running water out over here so it's a pretty smart design this guy up here is going to be taken off and then it gets plumbed into the pipe that goes outside and and that's how she works so I'm gonna next I'm going to take out all the pumps down in the hole here I can't really see it all that great but this is a 50 gallon drum that's tied into all the weeping tile and I'm gonna take the pumps out of there and then I'm going to replace it with these guys right here so hopefully you found that interesting I'll make sure that I put a link to this solar pump down below it comes in two variants a third horse and a half horse this third horse can push up to 35 gallons per minute at 10 feet of head there's some great pump curves online that you can take a look got to see how effective it's going to be for your particular application if you're looking for a sump pump I highly recommend this one it's not an affiliate turning I get no money for recommending it I just got a lot of questions about sump pumps because people don't really know what to go for these ones are typically only available at plumbing supply store so you won't find this at Home Depot or Lowe's or any of those stores what makes it a little different is its cast iron so it's a little bit more robust one thing you want to think about when you're installing this and operating it is that you want to make sure that the pump is cycled on a semi-regular basis so if like me your ground water kind of dries up or freezes in the wintertime and the pump can sit idle for up to six months every month or so you want to come down and you want to put some water into the barrel and cycle the pump a couple of times it's just really good to keep everything moving pumps and motors don't really like sitting idle for long periods of time so it's good to exercise them and so just one more little thing that you can see on my system here so we've got our well water right beside our actual sump pump which is smart because if any of these systems on the well actually break it will drain first into the sump right here but we've got this little hose bib right here which we can turn on and when we turn our hose bib on it will allow us to cycle water into the system which will allow me to exercise the pump if you found this interesting and helpful make sure you hit the like button below it helps the channel to track if you want more of these types of videos make sure you have to subscribe and you've got a specific type of video that you want me to produce make sure you leave it in the comment section below I'd love to produce it for you I'm always looking for new content anything to do with permaculture resilient homes acreages and farms anything mechanical related as it pertains to that just let me know put it in the comments thanks everyone have a great day and we'll see you in the next video

Channel: VergePermaculture

Views: 63,871

Keywords: sump pump, pump, basements, water, ecological design, flood, flooding basements, back up pump, pumps, weeping tile, drainage, Zoeller, Zoeller Sump Pump

Id: Vm4TYwTRmt0

Length: 15min 19sec (919 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 26 2017