Hi All,
I’ve got a customer who would like a sump pump installed in their basement. I’ve installed several sump pumps before but I’ve always been able to run the water out and away from the house via piping. This particular home and it’s surrounding land is dead, and I do mean dead, flat, so I’m ruling running a pipe outside out.
So is it OK to run it into the sewer line in the basement, or for that manner, into a laundry tub in the basement?
Thanks,
Dave
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Replies
I wouldn't. The problem is that the water that you are trying to pump out may be coming out of the sewer.
I guess you mean if the sewer backed up, right?Dave
The only folks who can answer that are the local authorities. In many areas of the country it's forbidden to empty a sump pump into the sewer, while in others it seems to be encouraged.
Where we live it will get you a hefty fine.
Illeagal in my area.
You get out of life what you put into it......minus taxes.
Marv
Most plumbing codes do not let you run sump pump discharge into sanitaty lines. You have to check with the local plumbing board. If you have any fall away from the house, run it out on to a splash block away from the foundation, three feet or so and you should be o.k. Lots of luck.
>>run it out on to a splash block away from the foundation, three feet or so and you should be o.kGet it well past the foundation overdig area. The backfill is more porus than the undisturbed soil around the house so if you dump it on the overdig, it just ends up back at the footers.
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Sojourners: Christians for Justice and Peace
It's illegal here in NW New Jersey (at least in Hackettstown).
One more thing...my sister-in-law, who is an engineer who designs drainage systems for large complexes (apt, offices, etc.), said it has more to deal with overloading the capacity of the sewage treatment centers.
Edited 6/29/2005 5:34 pm ET by thang
In areas with municipal sewage systems it is generally illegal. It is a bad idea because it adds substantially to the load on the treatment system which eventually leads to the necessity to construct a larger system. My previous village had to construct an entirely new sewage treatment system in part from loading of people discharging sump pumps and roof gutters into it.
In a septic system it will surely overload it.
As with the others, it's illegal to connect "storm" runoff to sanitary sewers.
Now, since you have a very flat site, what you may need is the lowest spot in the flat, and sink a drywell there. That gives you a "sump" outside of the house to drain "to."
Most likely it is illegal, no matter where you live. Reason being this water is not metered. So you would be dumping water into the system without having to pay for it.
Secondly you could be adding to the system which is not designed to carry the extra load.
Will it make a significant difference, most likely probably not, however do you want to be responsible for any cost should the cat get of the bag.
They meter your waste water? Never heard of that.
No, they meter the supply water. Waste is assumed to be a percentage of that, so the waste portion of the bill is calculated based on what is supplied. If the property is not hooked up to waste, only the supply portion is billed.
So the more water you use the more you are charged for waste? My water bill and waste is always the same cost every month, I guess that is why I did not realize.
My water bill and waste is always the same cost every month
Your utility may average the water bills presented to you.
Mine only varies slightly month-by-month. The "measured" month, though for setting the sewer rate is December, as there's some sort of empirical data supporting that it's the lowest water usage month (I'd think it would be January, what with not having a bunch of utility-wasting relatives hanging about . . . )Occupational hazard of my occupation not being around (sorry Bubba)
"Waste is assumed to be a percentage of that,"in my town that percentage is 100%
bobl Volo, non valeo
Baloney detecter
when you pay your water bill the municipaltity doesn't care what you do with it. Wash your car, let your hose run allnight long, flush your toilet 20 times a day, bottle and give it to your aunt jennie.
You pay for the water going in and the water leaving essenticaly, now when you take ground water and put it into the system, you haven't paid for the use of that water.
Hopefully that clears it up for you
Yes it does. Thank you.
"when you pay your water bill the municipaltity doesn't care what you do with it. Wash your car, let your hose run allnight long, flush your toilet 20 times a day, bottle and give it to your aunt jennie...
You pay for the water going in and the water leaving essenticaly, now when you take ground water and put it into the system, you haven't paid for the use of that water."So, you're saying putting sump discharge into the sewer (for free) makes up for all the water you DIDN'T put into the sewer but had to pay for anyway. (Like the sprinkler and the water you and your aunt Jennie drank). Sounds fair to me.
Hopefully I can clarify this, when you pay your water bill, part of that service is also the on the discharge end(ie: sewer). I'am not aware of any metering system on a residential sewer. So when your municipality provides you water service they assume that a portion of that water used is going into their sewer.
Now if you put groundwater into the system, your cheating the system, the water that you put has never been metered, hence you never paid for the discarge end of the service.
As far as watering your lawn, its kind of like paying taxes for maintenace of a road. You may never use that road but your still paying for the upkeep. Never did I advocate that the water that you put on your lawn or the water that aunt jennie gets some how balances out the fact that it doesn't go into the sewer.
Might seem fair to you, but it is still illegal.
I don't think it is a usage issue, but instead believe it relates to capacity.
A municipality's sewage treatment facilities have a designed capacity, and if property owners pump groundwater into that system, surges can occur during rainstorms or wet seasons that can flood the sewer systems.
That is why it's illegal.
I've seen many occurrences of sumps being piped to sewer lines, after final inspection of construction.Gene Davis, Davis Housewrights, Inc., Lake Placid, NY
Some places around here base the sewer charges on the average of several months of winter water usage. And there have been talks of taxing storm water based on a sq ft of the area. But it has not gone anywhere.Where I live we put in a whole new sewer collection system. Not only becuase of infilatration, but the old system was built in 28 for "summer cabins" and was completely overloaded.Several years later they had to smoke bomb all of the hosues because they where still having problems will high infiltration. Found lots of drainspouts that where hooked up. And places where the contractor did a pi$$ poor job of hooking up to the remains of the old system. At my house the smoke started coming out of the ground. BTW, that was one of many screw ups by the contractors.But typically smoke test won't show up sump connection because they go through a trap.
"But typically smoke test won't show up sump connection because they go through a trap."
I've never seen a sump go through a trap. But most of them seem to have a foot valve, which keeps the smoke out.
Nothing is wrong with California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure. [Ross MacDonald (1915-1983)]
Here in Roanoke (VA) the sewer portion of the utility bill is based on the amount of water consumed.Some businesses and individuals with a high water use rate and a low sewer use rate (the local Coke & Pepsi bottling plants, forex) have a separate meter on the sewer lines. City will install, but bills for installation.Sump pumps and gutters emptying into the sewer or street gutters aren't allowed now, not because of a loss of revenue but because of the problem with overloading the system capacity.Leon Jester
A couple guys already told me that. Now I am stating if someone has a pump in their basement and it is pumping more than 10 gallons a week then there are problems with the house. I have a sump in my basement and it only runs about once a week.
Minus flood conditions, I'd have to agree with you on that one, Bug.Here, we're in a valley surrounded by mountains that run about 1,200 to 2,000 feet above our elevation (~900 ft AMSL). [Those of you old enough, think Dien Bien Phu. Vive le Troisième Régiment!] Rocky, clayed soil, so when there's a heavy rain, lots of places have wet basements.Fortunately, ours is relatively dry, last week, with sucessive downpours of +2 inches in less than 3 hours we had seepage from the uphill side, at base of a window box, which thoughtfully runs across the floor to a floor drain.Leon Jester
If the house has it's own septic system, that system was designed to handle a maximum number of gallons perday. Force it to handle more than that and it will not be long before it fails and the owners would see massive costs fopr replacement.
If on a municipal syustem, they undoubtedly have rules agaist this sort of misuse and there could be fines incurred.
here is the solution -
you dig a drywell, a hole in th ground filled with stone and surronded by fabric to keep fines out. In a way , it is a mini septic system except that all it has to handle is water, not solids that must be diested. The water percolates into the surrondiong soil so make it far enough away from the house that the same water doesn't find its way back inside again.
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I hold a sewerage and collections license in NJ and we call that I&I (inflow and infiltration). It increases the flow to a plant with water that doesn't need to be treated. It just raises the sewer taxes for the towns. So around here it's a big NO!
Headstong, I'll take on anyone!
Hmm. Not familiar w/ NJ ways, but as a sewage collections license holder, maybe you could answer for me a question I have: WHy do governments charge for sewage at the rate the homeowner consumes potable water? Knowing, as everyone does, that the amount of water used is always MORE than the amount going down the draught, doesn't it seem like, well, theft, to charge a sewer cost that's equal to the amount of water bought?Speaking of inflow, why NOT meter inflow at the sewer connection? Seems reasonable enough to me. Then you wouldn't have to go about charging a "sewer tax" on TOP of everyone's monthly sewer bill. (Is that for real, btw?)
Edited 6/29/2005 10:04 pm ET by SUNTOAD
This is a simple matter of practicality. Metering each home's sewage would be next to impossible considering the solids in the stream. So instead, they meter the incoming water and charge you in proportion to your water consumption for BOTH incoming and out-going water treatment.
Groundwater shouldn't go to the sanitary sewer because it doesn't need to be treated. The same goes (double) for roof drainage. It just adds to the water flow to the sewage treatment plant and pushes it over-capacity. Plus the cost of treating the water is so much per gallon- diluting it doesn't make it easier to treat.
This relatively clean water should go to surface and have a chance to re-enter the water table, or drain off the land via rivers and lakes without need of further treatment.
The main reason that they don't want sump pumps emptying into sanitary sewers around here is because it overloads the sewage treatment plant. Has nothing directly to do with billing (though allowing sump pump attachment would certainly increase water/sewer bills).
Jemco, You got it correct!! I am involved with our city govt, 1 mile sq, approx.6,000 pop. We abandoned our own sewage treatment plant back in the late 60's. At that time it was ok to tie in sumps/weeping tiles to the sanatary. We are now connected to the county sewers and we have a metering pit where we inter the system and we know how much goes in and pay the county for that. On a dry month our charges are in the area of $10,000.00 a month when it rain our fees for treatment are in the excess of $40,000.00 a month. We are paying to treat mainly rain water. A number of times we had to discharge raw sewage in the our creek to prevent back ups in basements. When the county is overloaded they have to do the same. We are in the process of our I&I study and doing a pilot program on separating sumps/weeping tile from sanatary, on a hand full of home in a area just to get a handle on the cost and work involved. Our county waste board has set a timetable for communities to comform or big fines $$$$$$
Bottom line: Dumping sump, downspouts, weeping tiles in sanatary is a big no no!!
Pay me now or alot more later!
he flow to a plant with water that doesn't need to be treated.
Now, the scuttlebutt from some of the treatment engineers I know hold that storm water need more treatment, as it has more POL & related auto polutants in it than "ordinary" sanitary sewage. That, that is what's driving the ever-increasing need for silt fencing and prevention of mud on ROW for construction sites.Occupational hazard of my occupation not being around (sorry Bubba)
You're confusing sanitary and storm sewerage. Sanitary sewage has WAY more pollutants in it than storm run-off, that's why it's treated and storm water generally isn't. But storm run-off from a city is far dirtier than ordinary rainwater run-off. THAT'S what's driving the need for silt fencing and storm drainage oil/water separators etc.
In old parts of town, there is/was only one sewer. These combined sewers are run to the treatment plant. Toronto had to build a huge storage tank under the lakefront to capture this combined sewer effluent so they could catch it all during storm events and meter it into the sewage treatment plants at a more reasonable rate. Otherwise they have to discharge improperly-treated water which then means they need to close the beaches.
In my town a sump pump can be hooked up to the storm sewer system unless there are open basement drains, in which case it has to drain to the sanitary sewer. The reason they gave was that water coming from the basement floor could be contaminated with oils and such which they would want to go through the treatment plant.
No, they are talking more and more aobut actually treating storm water.Run off pesticides, oil on the roads, anti-freeze and the like.
You're confusing sanitary and storm sewerage
No, it's the people with "environmental engineering" in their titles.
Suffered through much classwork on the fundamental differences in sewerage & treatment of same.
That's why it caught my attention when the EnvEngies start talking about having to treat street runoff as if it were an oilspill or filled with heavy metals. Could just be that the "storm" guys have had "plant envy" of the "sanitary" guys. Part has to be the ever-more micro-defined "polution" standards applied every year by regulatory agencies, too. I've heard a couple or three of the ilk ranting on how all roof runoff ought to be regulated, why there's all sorts of things on roofs!Occupational hazard of my occupation not being around (sorry Bubba)
Hah I should of known that here in San Francisco they would be doing it differently. Here the Storm sewers and sanitary sewers are one and the same. All the roof runoff is piped into the sanitary system. I don't know how they do it but they meter the outgoing water also and charge you accordingly. For a couple of months my outgoing water was WAY higher than my incoming water usage. I called the water dept. and asked them WTF- I mean how could that even be possible. They said it was a rainy couple of months and that's why the outgoing flow was more. In fact in SF you are required to run your roof run off into the sewers.
In front of every house on my block on the side walk is this little 4" square grill that acts as some kind of overflow/vent. One year the sewer backed up and raw sewage was pouring out of these vents onto the sidewalk...so unbelievably disgusting.
Luckily for SF they have the Ocean right there and during the rainy seasons they routinely pump this overflow sewage water right into the ocean.Daniel Neuman
Oakland CA
Crazy Home Owner
SF doesn't have separate stormwater drains in a lot of places, so they have you run it into the sewer instead of (a) doing nothing with it, or (b) pouring it across the sidewalk. As far as I know, they do not meter what you discharge, they figure it based on your usage of city water and how much it's been raining.
Sooner or later they'll start putting in separate stormwater drains. That'll be a hefty bond measure.
Any environmental engineer who thinks there's more pollution in storm runoff than there is in sanitary sewerage is an idiot. Their head is full of sanitary sewage. But by no means is storm run-off "clean". Nothing running off land occupied by humans is "clean" any more. City run-off and agricultural run-off are both polluted, just in different ways by different species.
As to whether or not storm run-off has to be treated, it depends on the locale and what its "history" is- what's currently running into it, and what the last couple of generations left for us. I've seen pee-yellow seepage coming out of a hillside behind a bankrupt chrome plating plant, headed for the "storm sewer" which in this case was a tributary of a local river which runs in to Lake Ontario. So in that case "source mitigation" was a very much better idea than trying to treat an entire river's flow for chromium. I also routinely smell the anaerobic stink of a "creek" running in a concrete-lined channel in a nearby ravine, and there's not much going into that except what's running off local parking lots and streets, diluted with whatever seepage comes out of the hillside. If it goes anaerobic and stinks, it needs treatment- call it a "nose test" if you will.
Stuffing the entire storm run-off of a city through a conventional sewage treatment plant would be crazy unless there were some extenuating circumstances like combined sewers etc. Putting it through a series of constructed wetlands is a different matter- where there's the room to do so.
It is not just sewage plant being over loaded that is a big part. It is the over loading the sewage pipe and causing the raw sewage to back up into the homes. All because to much water being pumped into sanitary sewer. When a lot of homes connected to the city sanitation not a lot of homes had check valves installed home drops. The load on sewer pipes were figured out to carry so many gallons 50 years ago in most places to handle more flow the city would have to dig up the pipe and either add more lines to the plant or increases the size. I for one pay to much in taxes as it is.
Edited 6/29/2005 10:35 pm ET by fredsmart
Around here it's not permitted. But offhand I can't think of a single house in town with an external sump pump discharge. And the city doesn't enforce it.
One thing to keep in mind, though - If the sewer plugs up, you could have problems.
The house we live in now is pretty new. And the ground is flat as a board, like the one that you're dealing with. And the sump pump runs into the sewer.
One day I woke up to heavy rains, and the sound of running water. And I could hear the sump pump running - About 5 seconds on and 10 seconds off.
When it finally dawned on me that I shouldn't be hearing water running INSIDE the house, I jumped out of bed and started investigating.
Turns out the sewer was plugged up outside the house. But the sump pump kept pumping water into it under pressure. So sewer water was backing up in the bathtubs, and running out around the wax rings under the toilets.
Fortunately I caught it before things got too bad. I unplugged the sump pump and got the sewer unplugged before the basement flooded.
But if it had happened while I was at work an hour later...
Espo,
DanH in reply 4 has it.
Bizzare rules in my locale - Northern New Castle County, DE. I live right on the border of the city of Wilmington -- border is a road. The folks who live on one side of the road (city) are required to pipe their rain gutter and any sump outfall to the sanitary sewer; folks on the other side of the road ( county, my side ) are prohibitted from piping rain / sump into the sanitary sewer.
However, there is a provision where a professional "basement water" contractor can get a permit to pipe sump outfall into sanitary sewer because of various oddities on particular building lots. My house has such a permit obtained by "B-Dry" basement waterproofing while the house was owned by a previous owner.
BossHog - my sump pump outfall goes through a 2" PVC drum trap before entering the main sanitary sewer line. I didn't do it - I inherited it from the previous owner, working good for the 13 years I've been here.
Check with the local autority!
Jim
Never underestimate the value of a sharp pencil or good light.
Edited 6/30/2005 5:36 pm ET by JTC1
I installed a sump in Southfield (michigan) I had to run a 4" pipe about 55' to a storm drain. not allowed to drain into the sewer.
I think this is all interesting but I also think if you have more than ten gallons of water a week going into a sump inside the house you have bigger issues than where you pump it.