Question:
I was reading an old Free Press article about sump pumps online and saw your contact information. My husband and I just built our first home and haven't landscaped yet, but are doing so beginning of June. Our neighbour, who's yard is much higher than ours, has his sump and ours both running into our yard and pooling. That is currently no big deal as we have no yard to speak of yet. Our neighbour's sump runs quite often compared to ours, for some reason.
He has proposed burying the lines together and running it out the back under the fence, to the reserve space, and digging a large hole for it to drain into. He also wants to fill the hole with gravel with soil on top. I've read so much about it freezing and also I'm worried because it would be our property that would be affected.
So many homes down our street all have dead grass along the side of their house due to the sump. We are about to sod the yard and we are so unfamiliar with sumps and what to do. I don't want to waste money on landscaping only to have dead grass next year.
Thanks so much, Kyla B.
Answer:
In our climate, with long cold winters, underground drains are a bad choice. The chances of freezing, blockage, heaving or simple damage are too high to say a system like this would work for more than a few years. I would look at other alternatives, such as a longer above-ground hose for your sump pump, which should be moved around to prevent pooling water in one area.
When homeowners are building new homes, or renovating older ones, it is tempting to rely on the numerous magazines and online articles extolling the virtues of various systems to make the home easier to maintain and more aesthetically pleasing. Unfortunately, many of these sources are published in climates nothing like ours in the Great White North. Something that may be very suitable in Southern California or western B.C. may not work here. Our extreme weather, with 60 C temperature variances between summer and winter, render many common building products or designs unusable. Compound that with the expansive clay "Manitoba gumbo" soil we have to build on, and you can have a recipe for disaster in some situations. Shallow underground drains simply do not work well here.
The main reason for avoiding shallow underground drainage systems is the possibility of freezing. Ask anyone who has left their small, flexible sump pump hose connected at the exterior of the house a little too late in the year. It will no longer be flexible and will easily crack and be rendered useless or simply plug up with ice when temperatures drop below freezing. If this happens, and the sump still fills with water due to warmer soil temperatures near the bottom of the foundation, the pump will run but not drain the water in the pit. In the least-problematic scenario, the pump will simply run until it overheats and trips the circuit breaker, or just burns itself out. In worse cases, the pit will overflow or the discharge pipe will break and water will spray inside or outside the home. (This could easily occur with any sump hose connected to an underground drain as well.)
If you are dead set on a subterranean drain, ensure there is a break between your sump pump discharge hose and the buried pipes. This can be accomplished by simply having the sump hose drain slightly above the area where the sub-soil pipes commence.
The benefit of this is twofold: This may prevent the complete freezing of the drainage system if the sump hose is sloped in such a way that it water cannot pool inside. More importantly, the drain pipe can be disconnected from the underground system during the winter months. This will prevent freezing-related issues already identified.
Compounding the futility of your neighbour's plan is the design of a shallow pit for the water to drain into. This will most certainly be problematic, as it will have limited capacity that could easily be exceeded in one good summer thunderstorm. This would not only render it useless, but could also cause the sump pump water to overflow at the intake side, flowing into your yard. Furthermore, the gaps between the stones in the pit would be blocked or filled with clay soil within a few years, making it a swampy area behind your home. (If the underground pipes were to discharge into a drainage ditch or swale, then it might work better and for a longer period of time.)
While it may seem like a practical and sensible thing to do before completing the grading and landscaping in your new home, burying an underground drain for the sump pump discharge is a bad choice. This will surely plug up or freeze at some point and likely be left in the ground abandoned after a few years, as most are. Your real focus should be on proper grading of the soil and grass around your home to naturally funnel water to swales that drain away from your home, either to the waste area behind the home or to the sewers or ditches near the front street.
Ari Marantz is the owner of Trained Eye Home Inspection Ltd. and the past president of the Canadian Association of Home & Property Inspectors -- Manitoba (cahpi.mb.ca). Questions can be emailed to trainedeye@iname.com. Ari can be reached at 204-291-5358 or check out his website: trainedeye.ca
