Back-up Sump Pump

[tdzik]

My basement flooded during the storms of last June here in the Midwest. My sump pump simply could not keep up.

I am going to install a second sump pump in case this should happen again. I've decided the back up should be battery powered in the event of a storm + power outage.

Here's my question: Do I need a separate line out of the basement for the second sump pump or should I just join the two pipes and run one line out?

I have 1 and 1/2 inch pipe with the current sump pump. If we had a repeat of the tremendous amounts of rain of last spring, would the size of this pipe be enough to allow both pumps to run at or near their capacity?

Thanks in advance for your advice/opinions.

Rob

[hallerb]

you far better off running a completely seperate pipe pump and everything so a single point failure cant screw up your world

doers you home sit above say the elevation of the street? your better off running a sump overflow line to daylight, gravity tends to be very dependable. I want to do that here this summer.

remember battery backup pumps require battery replacement every few years. even a perfect battery kept charged loses capacity over time

[Smarty]

Also consider that battery-operated pumps normally have far less pumping capacity when compared to normal pumps operating off A.C. power lines. In a power outage, they will provide comparatively little relief.

Smarty

you far better off running a completely separate pipe pump and everything so a single point failure cant screw up your world

doers you home sit above say the elevation of the street? your better off running a sump overflow line to daylight, gravity tends to be very dependable. I want to do that here this summer.

remember battery backup pumps require battery replacement every few years. even a perfect battery kept charged loses capacity over time

[ransley]

If you have city water look at

it out performs battery in every way

[EXT]

Look at how the water got in the basement and try to work to keep it out. This may require changing roof drainage and preventing surface water from finding its way in.

[Steve Barker DLT]

You already said one pump couldn't handle the flow. SO, two pumps into one line won't work either.

s

[tnom]

Your pump can't keep up? Are you implying that your house became a island in the flood plain? That should be the only reason a single pump wouldn't be able to keep up. Even a dozen pumps couldn't keep up with that.

If your house wasn't surrounded by water and your pump couldn't keep up then you should be looking at fixing the real problem. Proper drainage around the foundation.

[jack]

As others have said, having two pumps on the same line would be suboptimal. The flow resistance would probably negate significant advantage.

I had a similar problem and installed a completely separate sump and pump. I put a battery pump as backup on one, and a water powered backup on the other. Then I moved. I found out the pump in my new (12 year old) house had been installed wrong and didn't work, but it had never mattered!

[mm]

Mine wasn't.

I didn't have a dozen pumps but I had one that had been enough for every rain etc. I'd ever had, and all the ones since then. It was the same size as the pump that rusted out at the water line, so it's been

29 years with that model pump.

Yet once the water was coming in the sump so fast the pump couldn't keep up. The sump was overflowing onto the basement floor. I checked and the water was going out the side of the house at full blast. There was no standing water in the yard outside the home. The floor of the basement is 6 feet below ground level, and the sump almost 2 feet deeper. The ground must have been saturated. IIRC it wasn't even raining that hard, but it had probably been raining a lot before that.

Besides getting a backup pump that would run in tandem, I was thinking of just a sump pump with a bigger motor, installed in place of the current one. I vaguely remember that my current one is 1 1/4 HP. Are there two sizes of pump that can fit in the same spot?