Wet!
We’re having record rains in Seattle.Seattle is known as a wet place, but I usually think of it as a damp place. It rains a lot here, but not very hard. This weekend that changed and we’re getting a few inches of rain per day.
This morning I woke up and checked on the basement and found water. The storage room had a 1/4″ puddle across most of it and it was making a little stream running across the basement floor to the low spot on the other side of the house. We’ve had flooding like this in the past, so I wasn’t too surprised. However I was getting sick of vacuuming a few gallons of it up every 30 minutes, so I checked outside.It’s just a little damp now, but this room had a lot of standing water this morning. In the second photo you can see the remains of the stream that ran across our basement.
Our house has french drains and I found that the east-side one was not functioning. The water was leaking out of the inlet pipe at a high rate and pouring down the foundation wall where it would come up through cracks in the floor. Christine and I made a hasty attempt to patch it with duct tape, but it was clear that wasn’t going anywhere. So we went to the hardware store and bought 50′ of new gutter downspouts. Now we have a temporary and very hacky gutter system, but the basement is dry. Our french drains were built with the wrong type of tubing, so we’ll probably need to repair/replace them instead of just being able to clean them out.
The temporary gutters:
We’re lucky, I know that many other houses in Seattle are getting more than puddles in their basements. The roads are a nightmare too, many of them have very deep puddles and we saw some sewer drains that were spewing water instead of accepting it. I hope everyone is staying dry out there.
Anyone know of a good french drain/gutterperson in Seattle?
I take it your drain was built with the incorrect English or Italian threaded tubing?
Based on the thin wall of the plastic I”m guessing that it started out English and was re-tapped out to French. It’’s very thin.
Ha! Excellent!
Hope you”re dry now, our basement had a very small leak that finally stopped around 11pm last night. I built a hotglue/foamcore/garbage bag dam to hold through the night, but it ended up not getting tested. The long-term solution is up to the landlord.
Bummer. That reminds me of my house in central IL. Because of the _very_ shallow water table, our basement floor had a hole cut out for a sump pump. A previous owner had illegally connected it to the house’’s sewer pipes. Rather than paying lots of money to appropriately connect it to the storm drain , I just ran a pipe to the driveway and dumped the water there. We sold the house, but I still feel a little guilty about it.
Huh,
The exact same thing happened to me on saturday. The drainage field from our psuedo french drain seems to have been comprimised by gophers or some such and 1″ of rain we got last weekend (which melted 4″ of snow) ended with a flood in my bike dungeon via the retaining wall leaking water out the bottom. I spent saturday afternoon reguttering part of our house. I need to do some more later… and figure out where the compromise is. Good luck!