On Sunday afternoon, when looking in our basement for some (250mL)
15W-40 engine oil to prep up a 1K2W inverter genset I'd bought from our local Lidl for 99 quid a couple of hours earlier, I discovered the coal hole section had become somewhat flooded and threatening to flood the main part of the basement.
A look for the repurposed W/M drain pump on a piece of plywood that I had used the last time this had happened over quarter of a century back failed to reveal my makeshift solution to a problem I'd thought I'd well and truly sorted out just a year or two after cobbling said emergency cellar pump so I landed up having to resort to bailing it out into a plastic bucket and hauling each bucket's worth up the steep stone steps to hand to my XYL to tip out onto the drive.
Needless to say, this was rather exhausting work so I only lowered the level by an inch or so to provide some respite against the rest of the basement floor transitioning from being merely damp to becoming actually submerged.
A few hours later, in the evening, our son finally emerged from his 'sick bed' (he was suffering from a cold of some sort - he didn't look particularly ill to me but looks, as I well know, can be deceiving) and offered to help bail out the basement using his "Wickes Wet 'n' Dry" 20L vacuum cleaner which he'd parked in the drier part of the basement (and which I hadn't realised was a "wet 'n' dry" cleaner).
Inconveniently, his offer of help, as per usual, was badly timed since I was nicely settled in front of my PC monitor, watching the last 45 minutes of E4's "Night at The Museum" evening movie by way of recuperation so I left him to deal with it, or not, on his own. He chose not to wait so dealt with it on his own. After the movie was finished I checked out his handiwork. The coal hole level was down to a few inch deep puddles which needed further attention (the level had risen by a half inch or so since he'd last vacuumed up the water about half an hour earlier).
At this point, I needed him to explain the 'wet' usage of his old Wickes wet 'n' dry cleaner so I could pump the sump dry. The sump consists of a
75mm plastic pipe concreted in place over a gravel filled sump hole at the far end of the coal hole that I'd put in place over 25 years ago for just such an eventuality. It had been hidden from his view by a stack of heavy duty cardboard tray boxes. I managed to pump out another 60 litres or so which he obligingly dumped each 20L canister's worth onto the driveway saving me the 3 or 4 trips up our basement stairway.
This morning, the level had actually dropped a half inch from where it had risen to some 3 hours after that last pumping out session when I checked it just after midnight. I managed to pump another 30 or so litres from the sump this time round suggesting that the local water table is actually returning back to normality after Saturday's "Monsoon Downpour" (according to my XYL - I never noticed such an event beyond the day being a bit wet and rainy).
I guess the problem must have been due to abnormally high rainfall after all rather than a failure in any of our waste water plumbing or roof drainage so it looks like I really do need to fit an automatic sump pump to complete the original project that I'd put on hold after completing the initial speculative provision of a sump pick up point over quarter of a century ago.
My problem at the moment is the total and utter failure of internet search engines to find a local supplier of suitable cost effective *self priming* sump pumps that don't rely on being submersible to function as such[1]. I want a pump that I can hang onto the wall (or park on a shelf) that will allow me to poke its inlet hose down the sump standpipe and route the outlet hose through a hole in the wall onto the driveway to pump some 20Lpm against a total of 3 to 5 metres maximum head of water pressure.
I'm willing to shell out up to 100 quid on a neat, all-in-one readymade solution but considering the effectiveness of that sub 50 quid wet 'n' dry vacuum cleaner at extracting the water from the sump standpipe, I'm half entertaining DIYing my own Franken-solution of adding a W/M pump to the wet 'n' dry vacuum cleaner along with, if necessary, some electronic switching logic to do the job "for free" (my son was quite willing to 'sacrifice' his old Wickes vacuum cleaner to the current task even if it meant it 'blowing up' as a result of such 'abuse').
The reason why I'm only "half entertaining" such a DIY project is that it would be more by way of metaphorically sticking two fingers up at "The cellar sump pump industry" for being such a bunch of cunts in failing to provide the obvious no brainer solution to my current problem since it would absorb a considerable portion of my free time and energy (basically, I'm a lazy sod).
Since I've reached the end of my tether in 'googling' a solution (source of a suitable self priming sump pump), I thought I'd prevail upon the potential source of collective wisdom and experience of this group for advice.
[1] Although I'm rather loath to dig out my sump standpipe, if needs must, I would but, of the bunch of potential 'submersible' pumps on page
121 of the Toolstation catalogue, it worries me a little as to what the description "Not suitable... for permanent installation." implies about each and every one of these pumps. Do they mean, "Don't chop the 13A plug off and wire into an FCU." or does it mean they're simply not able to withstand being sat in a puddle of water indefinitely in between pumping sessions?