It seems like just yesterday I was writing in this space about how to protect your home from the most severe cold weather we had experienced locally in a generation. The meteorological extravaganza that is Central Illinois weather continues this week with the most severe flash-flooding conditions I have ever witnessed locally in my lifetime—seven inches of rain in just a few hours on Saturday morning! And now the special Polar Vortex: Summer Sequel has brought us temps 20 degrees below normal. There’s hardly ever a dull moment around here!
With the extreme rain event, dealing with water runoff issues suddenly has top of mind awareness. Whether your home has a basement or a crawlspace, take time to evaluate surface drainage conditions around your house. If you happened to have a chance to look outside during the weekend deluge, you might have noticed areas where water pooled against the house. Even if it did not flood your basement or crawlspace, this is not a good state of affairs, and some effort should be taken to improve drainage away from the house. The best drainage solution is one that makes your sump pump as irrelevant as possible by keeping water from ever reaching it in the first place.
Be sure that the soil slopes away from the house and out into the yard. This is often not the case, especially on newer homes. The reason is that when new homes are constructed, the foundation gets excavated and poured, followed by a backfill of dirt against the newly poured wall. This backfill is not as densely packed as the undisturbed dirt, and it will settle over time. The result is that a house that starts out with good grading away from the foundation may end up with a depression around the perimeter after the backfill dirt settles over time.
If you have plenty of concrete foundation exposed—like several inches—you can build up the level of the soil by simply adding dirt and then planting grass or other plants on top of it. But you must not add so much dirt that you leave any less than a couple of inches of visible concrete foundation exposed. This is because building up the dirt all the way to the bottom of your siding is like installing a handicapped accessible ramp for termites, enabling them to march right out of the ground and into the wood framing members of your home’s structure.
If you don’t have room to build up the ground level around your home, you will want to contact a local landscaper or turf contractor (and Mahomet has several excellent ones!) to regrade the area. This would involve pulling dirt away to make water run away from the house, creating a low valley area (called a drainage swale) at least 10 or 15 feet away from the house where water collects and then runs farther away to a sewer drain or a remote corner of your lot. This scenario will require that you do considerable replanting of grass and other vegetation, but it can save your sump pump, crawl space, or basement from significant damage over time.
Ideally, your home’s drainage would minimize the need for a sump pump, but part of that is purely luck. Some homes sit on very well drained soil such that even deep basements may have sump pumps that never run, while others run almost continuously in wet weather. Sump pumps eventually fail, as all mechanical devices do. They also require electricity, which has a higher than average likelihood of being interrupted during a severe storm.
With this in mind, installing a backup sump pump is cheap insurance (especially since most standard homeowners policies don’t cover flooding caused by sump pump failure unless you have a special rider at additional cost). If your home is on a public water system (e.g., the Village water utility or the Sangamon Valley Water System), install a hydro-powered backup sump pump, which uses water pressure from your household water lines to power an impellor, which then sucks water out of the sump pit, discharging both the ground water and the fresh water used to power the backup pump.
These systems will run indefinitely in a power outage, unlike a battery backup. You should also invest in a sump pump alarm that will sound if the primary pump fails and the hydro-powered backup starts to do the work. Otherwise, you may not realize the backup is doing all the work until you get a $400 monthly water bill.
If you are on a private well, you’ll need to rely on a generator with a secondary electric pump or a battery backup pump. If using the latter, keep in mind that the batteries will deteriorate over time and should be tested periodically and replaced as needed. Battery backup systems will run in an emergency, but only for a limited time.
In many homes with backup pumps, both pumps share a single discharge line. That poses a serious problem if your buried line collapses or experiences a blockage, as happened to me several years ago. If possible, run the discharge from the backup pump outside the house at the surface where you can see it. That will ensure that a blocked or collapsed primary discharge won’t result in a flood, and it will also make you more likely to see that the backup pump is running. Just be sure that the discharge runs at least several feet away from the house or terminates onto a driveway or patio that slopes away from the house.
Gutters and downspouts also figure prominently into the equation. Keep in mind, though, that in a sustained downpour, your gutters will overflow, which leaves you vulnerable to flooding if you don’t have proper grading sloped away from the house. The biggest nuisance with downspouts is the extensions that direct water away from the house. These blow away in strong winds, get crushed by kids, and demolished by lawn mowers. Too often, this leaves downspouts dumping water right into the foundation of the house.
For an elegant permanent solution to these problems, have a landscaper cut a trench from your downspouts out into the yard, and install a buried downspout extension that discharges water up and out into the middle of the yard. This solution is especially helpful if any of your downspouts currently discharge onto your driveway or entry sidewalk, where they can cause massive ice buildup during winter freeze-thaw cycles.
If you have a crawlspace and think these issues don’t affect you, think again! Crawlspaces pose a special risk, since most homeowners do not check crawlspaces regularly, which means that swampy or flood conditions can remain for a prolonged period of time, resulting in a mold farm, corrosion to your ducts, warping floors, and musty smell.
Further complicating crawlspaces is the fact that radon mitigation systems, which are becoming very common as more and more homes test high for this naturally occurring radioactive gas, tightly seal a thick plastic gas barrier over the entire crawlspace floor. This means that if water pours into your crawlspace from a vent or other opening, the water will sit on top of the gas barrier with no way to soak into the ground. Since crawl spaces are not supposed to be ventilated (which is a change from old school building theory and practice), this means all that moisture sits there until it evaporates into your home, risking mold issues, excess humidity inside the house, and a bigger workload for your air conditioner.
Be sure to check your crawlspace periodically. Install a sump pump if necessary. If a sump pump is already present, but standing water is still present elsewhere, you may need to install drainage tile or surface trenches to direct all water into the sump pit. If water sits on top of the plastic, you may also need to run a dehumidifier in the crawlspace occasionally.
Finally, if you have a finished basement, consider contacting your insurance agent to find out if you have coverage for flooding or damage caused by sump pump failure. With the increasing prevalence of finished basements containing tens of thousands of dollars of finish work and belongings, don’t let a fallible sump pump be your only insurance.
A native of Champaign County and a graduate of Champaign schools and the University of Illinois, Matt has worked as a full-time real estate professional for twelve years. While working full time, Matt simultaneously attended law school full time at the University of Illinois, graduating in 2004. Matt takes seriously his legal and ethical obligation to represent the best interests of his clients, working diligently on their behalf, whether buying or selling a property. Matt avoids potentially injurious conflicts of interest by not engaging in dual agency, i.e., representing both buyer and seller in a single transaction. Matt’s combination of skill and experience has helped him become one of the highest producing REALTORS® in the area.
