All Homes Need a Sump Pump Myth

It is a myth that any home needs a sump pump and drain tile system. These systems are at best a temporary emergency fix for a problem of water leaking in the basement. They should never be relied on to pump water out of your basement continually. If your sump pump is running then you have a leak.

We use the analogy of a fire sprinkler system for sump pump systems. It is a good to have an emergency fire sprinkler system when there’s a fire. But, you do not want to use the fire sprinkler for every day events, like cooking. If every time you fried potatoes on your stove and it started a massive fire in your kitchen, the sprinkler system would save your house from burning down, but you would be extremely disappointed with your kitchen. The sump pump is doing the very same thing with water leaking in the basement.

With a sump pump system, water is still leaking into your basement. And, in order to get to the sump pump, the water now flows along the footings under your walls. These footings are holding up your house. The water is still undermining the soil stability around the footings of your home. It is impossible for some pump systems to isolate water from the footings. Every single time the sump pump turns on your house settling. So we see some pump and drain tile system are an emergency backup pump for extreme weather situations. But, for 97% of homes, they are not necessary day to day.

But what about the other 3%?

Some homes were erroneously built in floodplains. A few others have inherited water from bad drainage practices of their neighbors in such a manner that they are source of the problem cannot be remediated. And these very rare circumstances (we only see this 3% of the time) a drain tile system (emergency backup system) must now be employed full-time to save the house from utter destruction.

Before you get convinced into wasting an extravagant amount of money on an unnecessary sump pump, we would suggest you study all our reasons for NOT getting a sump pump. Our explanation of how sump pumps work will immunize you against slick talking salesman. They want you to buy something that is not necessary and may even be counterproductive to having a dry, damp free basement.

Basement waterproofing for water in basement has led to some inaccurate theories of how water moves underground on its way to get the basement wet. We can help with DIY basement waterproofing by accurately understanding how water is getting into the basement.