Basement flooding

Regarding the water powered sump pumps, it is a win win for the city as the water and sewer bills will go up with every power outage.

@Ron045 and @IRON HORSE,

I read your comments with a lot of interest.  I grew up in Pittsburgh, and left after college.  We had a basement of course, but I don't really recall any water ever.  Our house was in the middle of a sloping hill as well.

I've been in Houston for 40 years, so no basement.  I kinda forgot what it's like.  We may be moving in the next 3-4 years, and having a basement is part of the decision.  That would be where the train would go.  The more info I can have about one will be a great help.  Thanks.

If the concern is keeping sump pumps running without breaking the bank, a small gas powered generator will work fine.  I powered two 1/2 HP pumps with a small generator that cost <$500 during a 3 day outage.  Just remember to maintain it and fire it up once a year if you don't use it often.  For short term power outages (several hours), my battery backup pump handled it.

Don

@texgeekboy posted:

@Ron045 and @IRON HORSE,

We may be moving in the next 3-4 years, and having a basement is part of the decision.  That would be where the train would go.  The more info I can have about one will be a great help.  Thanks.

Pick high ground.

Tell your builder to build the basement at grade and then bury it.  That is somewhat a joke.  But there are a lot of houses built after mine where they were only half dug out and then 100+ dump trucks showed up to bury the rest and grade everything away from the house.

I was the first house on the street built.  This is my neighbor.  Our properties  were somewhat level before he built.  Now look at it.

Ensure all basement windows are above grade.

If the above is not possible, have drains installed in the floor below every window that lead to a sump pit.

Same with exit doors or bilco doors.

Have a basement waterproofing company do their thing during the build process.

Make sure they install the sump in a true low point.  Maybe look at two sump pits, one on each side of the house.

Make sure HWH is somewhere near a sump pit in case of leaks or drainage.

Ensure exit pipes run below the freeze line when exiting the house.  Preferably to the street or drainage area.

Or... Don't build a basement.

Some of the above may sound extreme.  But I have had two houses built in my life and these are my experiences.

Good luck.

Ron

@Ron045,

Oh my gosh, thanks!!  It looks like I'll have to stick around OGR until I move to make sure I can get back to this post!

Seriously, thanks again.

The house I am living in now my parents built in 1967. We always had a water problem in the basement. After an acquired the home in the early 2000s I had a contractor looking a a rotted sill plate on top of the foundation. He noticed mold and asked me if I had a water problem. I told him yes and he recommended interior French drains with two sump pumps. He did that job for me and no more water problems. The only addition I made was for devices called “Pump Spy”. They plug into the outlet the sump pumps are plugged into and text me and email me id there is a power failure or loss of  WiFi.  Through the app I can see the activity of the pump. The only issue I have ever had is when the GFI outlet tripped and I didn’t pay attention to the power loss because the house still had power.  DAh. Lesson learned Finally yes that is my train room since it as finally dry. More room than a spare BR.

@IRON HORSE posted:

I like the suggestion of a water detection alarm system for the floor.

In the meantime, whenever we get heavy rain for an extended period, my blood pressure rises.

I too am a basement railroader!

I can relate to much of what you said...I edited what you said and left the 2 most important to my wife and I.

An alarm system does not need to be super expensive. The prior home owner left a cheap little alarm that stands upright and has two prongs at the bottom. When water hits the 2 prongs the alarm goes off. It runs on a 9-volt battery and runs for months. It works well for us that we can hear it in our kitchen if the weather is potentially bad. The big problem is that when the water triggers the alarm, you are already in trouble...but on the other hand, you can feel better/reassured when the alarm is not sounding.

We have our second submersible pump and I'm not too happy with their performance. The first one worked sporadically and the second one seems to have a higher water level before it kicks in. More recently, when visiting a train friend in Lancaster County, PA, I bought a 5 gallon Craftsman Evolv Wet/Dry Vac at a community garage sale...the price was perfect (free), but it was a retirement community so I gave $5, to be fair. It was almost a sign from above...on the second day of the garage sale, I looked out from my friend's kitchen and saw the wet/dry vac sitting under a neighbor's table (who said it worked and seemed intact including a broken wheel that can be glued back on). I have not used it yet (hope I never will, but realistically will)...I have high hopes for it. It is the perfect size for our crowded basement.

Tom

PS--yes, I'm sure our blood pressure rises, too. The worst was Hurricane Ida a few years ago.

I have a walk-out basement, but there's still a real possibility of significant water.  I have an alarm sensor that is about 8-9" into the sump that is connected to my central alarm system.  We get an alert on our phones for any water, and if we're home there are multiple horns that sound when water rises in the sump.  I also have a spare pump with a hose for emergencies that I can stick in there and stuff the hose out the window if necessary.

When I bought my current house three years ago, it was 22 years old.  The basement never flooded and there is no sump pump, but the floors were glistening damp, and there were 6 places around the edges of the  basement floors, against the foundation walls, where there were puddle stains, with small amounts of water coming in every time it rained.  It stunk of mildew.

The house sits on a relatively flat little area, with good slope away from the house starting about 6 feet out from the foundation all of the way around.

I could see that the 20 year old, small gutters, all of the way around, were not carrying water away and down the spouts.  The gutters have gutter guards on top.

I got up on the roof, and saw that this cheap 25 year shingle roof had lots and lots of its shingle gravel washed off, and it was down on top of the gutter guards, clogging them shut.  Also, the small size gutters were too small to handle the water run-off from the large and very slanted roofs, when a big rainstorm came.

As a consequence, all of the rain was jumping the gutters, and falling straight down do the soil around the side of the house.   As could be expected, after years and years of this, a three inch deep "trench" had formed around the outside of the foundation, about 5 inches wide, which simply held the water until it seeped into the foundation walls and worked its way down inside of the basement.

So, instead of bringing in a basement "foundation expert" and paying him ten thousand dollars to fool with the inside of the basement, I did the following:

1.   I had about 10 tons of clay soil trucked in,   and had it deposited in  6 piles around the sides of the house.  (It was delivered it two shipments, by a small 5 ton dump truck.)

2.  I hired two good laborers (not a general contractor), and with three good shovels and two good wheel barrels I worked with them in shoveling that soil up against the sides of the house 6 inches high against the foundation, and sloping gently out for 4 feet.   It took about 8  days of hard work.   We then tamped down the soil with a hand tamper.

3.  I then covered this soil with two layers of black  6-mil plastic, and pinned down in place.

4.   At the outer edge of the plastic, I staked down landscape timbers, all of the way around.

5.   I bought 6 tons of decorative light colored river rock, and had it put in 6 piles around the outside of the house.

6,   Back came the laborers, and we filled the plastic area with the decorative rock.

7,   I had the shingles and tar paper stripped from the roof, and put a new roof on with #30 tar paper and 35 year shingles.

8.   I replaced all of the gutter and down spouts with the large size gutters, and extra down spouts, and made sure that the down spouts  emptied at least two feet away from the foundation wall.  I did not put gutter guards on, because I don't have a single tree within 50 feet of the house.

Problem totally solved.  After that, no water ever comes into the basement anywhere.  I installed a $500 dehumidifier with the discharge hose running to a floor drain and ran it constantly.    It took three whole months for that basement to dry out.  The color of the concrete floor finally changed from damp/dark gray to white.  Now, there a clean, "new construction" smell in the basement.  Zero mold or mildew smell.  My train track never rusts.

All in all, this cost a lot of money, but the house was large and expensive and it was money well spent since it solved all of the problems, and the cost will be added to the cost basis of the house as a capital expense when I sell it, and due to the massive jump in housing prices over the last 3 years my house value has increased three times more than the cost of this solution.

I hope that this gives folks some ideas as to what can be done to solve problems.   I am able to plant some bushes in the river rock area by buying dwarf plants, and cutting small round holes in the plastic to plant them in.

Thanks,

Mannyrock

I put French drains in the back yard and also added some swales to move the water. I understand about putting French drains in the basement along the foundation but it seems to me that it's best to catch the water far away from the house if the situation allows for it. In my case, the lowest spot in my yard is about 30 feet away from the house. I arranged the drains to capture that area and radiate out from there. It works better than I could have ever dreamed and the basement has been dry. So I'm voting French drains. They're a lot of work to do correctly but they do work very well when done correctly with geotextile fabric, cleaned rock, and slotted pipe.

In my case exterior French Drains weren’t a good choice.   I have an oil tank for heating oil, a  drain in the back for sewage to a septic tank and a cement porch in the front.  To excavate  along the foundation outside would not have been a very good option.

@Santa Fe Jim posted:

In my case exterior French Drains weren’t a good choice.   I have an oil tank for heating oil, a  drain in the back for sewage to a septic tank and a cement porch in the front.  To excavate  along the foundation outside would not have been a very good option.

It's tricky. My backyard was just empty so it was easy enough. A big system in the yard won't work for everyone for sure.

I originally had drainage issues.  Now, I have 6" half-round gutters that directly dump water into the city's drains.  I removed all the concrete around the swimming pool and in the driveway then 'dry' laid (no cement) 6" gravel with leech fields and 6" sand on top of the gravel .  They are topped with Travertine around the pool and concrete brick (herringbone) in the driveway.  I have zero drainage problems... but, it sure tuckered me out!

My first boyhood American Flyer layout was in the basement of the family home in Peoria IL. Rain water was seldom a problem - nothing that the basement floor drain couldn't handle.

During my early adult years,  I lived in houses with a basement (Urbana, IL Columbus OH and Denver, CO) but I didn't have train layouts then. Years later when we relocated to central Arkansas, I discovered most homes in the Natural State don't have basements, although some have attics.  I visited several hobbyists in the area, and I was impressed by those who built a layout in the attic where the entry staircase emerged in the MIDDLE of the upstairs layout -- no duck-under required for an around-the-walls design. It's probably cheaper to plan for insulation and AC in an attic than installing French drains, alarms, and run-off channels for protection of a basement layout.

In my case, the previous owner of our house (a draftsman) built an L-shaped wing at the rear of the house for his home/work office. That space at ground level had its own entry door and became my Train Room with a 15x19-foot layout, plus some adjacent space for a small workshop. Serendipitous!

But its ground level entry became a rain water issue because some rain water seeped under the entry wall and doorway at the North side.  I hired a two-person crew to remove the entry concrete sidewalk and lower the level of the ground by four inches along that wall. After that relatively easy fix, the train room is now dry.

A tip to hobbyists ... take Mother Nature, geometry, and the lay of the land into account when deciding on a location for your layout.

Mike M     LCCA 12394

I have hand dug many French Drains by hand, when the water that I have running away from the foundation (by banking the soil against it) has no place to go.

I dig the trench two-feet deep, and 18 inches wide.   Even though there is a big plastic perforated pipe in it, having all of that extra gravel insures that it will never stop carrying water or back up.  My longest one was about 12 feet long.

(Those two summers I spend as a ditch digger in 1974 and 1975 were not a waste.)

Mannyrock

Our first house had a major basement flooding problem.  The house was built in a low lying area such that after heavy rains, the water table would rise up above the basement floor.  I waterproofed the from the floor to about 3 up the walls.  That helped a lot, but didn't completely solve the problem.  I never put trains in that basement.  The house was a Cape Cod with the second floor finished.  I had half of the upstairs for trains.

When looking for a second house, a dry basement was my top criteria.  We found a ranch house with walkout basement that was nice and dry and most of it was finished.  I had a nice layout there for many years.

Our third home didn't really have a room for me to have a train layout.   I stored my trains on shelves in the basement (all unfinished). 

While living in our second and third houses, I always worried about a broken pipe flooding the basement and destroying all of the trains.

After I retired, we moved into our fourth home.  My wife and I had a deal.  I would get a detached garage, and she would get an inground pool.  The garage is a 2 story building 30' x 28' with full HVAC.  The entire second floor is my trainroom.  When I hired the architect to design the garage, he asked about having a bathroom.  I told him I did not want any water in that building.  Finally, I no longer have to worry about my trains getting flooded.

Basement is generally dry, but very heavy rain with highly saturated ground will see water seep in through the foundation. We installed interior french drains with two sumps, and they've worked nicely for the last year and handled what would have been 3-4 flooding rains so far. We have a transfer switch/interlock for a portable generator, so I can power the panel with my generator if needed during an extended power outage, or I suppose the worst case scenario being during a flooding rain event. Planning on finishing most of the basement, and building a substantial layout/train room...so this thread has me thinking about some additional safeguards and backups against water.

Basements are not the only flood problem.  In most of the south US coast, there are not basements so the trains have to be in the house or garage, etc.  Well Hurricanes, storms and tornado's can tear off the part of the roof or cause a tree to tear into your roof or worst.  My 6 year old train room, over a two car garage, had a large tree lose a big limb that tore into the roof and cost $7000 to fix, fortunately no rain or water damage.  In 2016, we in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, LA had 30 plus inches of rain and thousands of houses that never had flooded ever, flooded and most did not have flood insurance as they were out of the so called 100 year flood plain.

So we feel your pain and most have generators for storm caused electrical outages.  Whole house generators have gotten more popular here in the last few years.

As I type us we are under severe storm warnings.

Charlie

@Mike Wyatt posted:

What about protection from basement flooding?? In a previous house (where I had an HO scale layout) we got 4 feet of water when the big grid failure in August of 2003 and the following electrical power outage.   Everything UNDER the layout was ruined, including the legs.                   

Many use a second electrical source- a deep-cell battery and/or a second sump pump.  The 2003 outage in the Northeast USA lasted a full two days in some areas.   So to be effective, this method assumes regular charging and periodic replacement of the deep cell battery, as well as the reliability of the sump pump itself.  And the battery may not last 2-3 days.                                                                                                                                                                                                                      Now I have a city water-powered backup system to my electric sump pump.  This system has a separate water level sensor (above the electric sump pump float) so that, in the event of an electrical outage or sump pump failure, the city water-powered system through a siphon device pumps 13.5 gallons per minute out of the sump using 9 gallons of city water.

So for the water to flood the basement,  we would have to have an electrical outage, and/or a sump pump failure, in addition to no city water supply.

Plus I replace the sump pump about every 2-3 years to be extra certain.

Update: 8/25/2023

Last night the storm apparently kicked out one of our GFIs- the one powering the sump pump.  So while the storm was raging and water was running IN, we had no water being pumped out.

I have 4 sump-pumps. One is on a battery back-up.

Without a gas or propane powered generator, when the power goes out for a few hours or more there will be floods.

I rewired all of the sumps electric plugins to ceiling-mounted electrical outlets that can be isolated with a throw-switch to a generator.

I recently visited my cousin who lives outside Palmyra, New York.  He has property that begins to gradually slope downward from behind his house, 500 feet or more, to a creek, which is the property line.  He has natural basement sump drainage, with the end of the drain pipe having a critter-proof cover, and a gravel area for runoff.

Since I have lived my entire life in the southwest, I have never had a basement, but wanted one.  When we moved to Amarillo in 2004, we found a very nice home built in 1940, which had a full, finished, basement that would have been ideal for a large layout.  However, the owners had owned the home since 1946, and, although it was an elegant home in an upscale neighborhood and had been immaculately maintained, they had never updated the 2-wire electrical wiring nor the original copper and lead plumbing.  With the torrential rains which we had in June and July, parts of Amarillo flooded.  So, I might have been adding my own basement water story to this topic.

We reluctantly kept looking and found a 2-year-old home, built -- as virtually all modern homes here are built, on a slab -- in a nice neighborhood, with a huge playroom upstairs.  So I have a smaller layout, but have never had any weather related problems in the train room or anywhere else in the house.  Nobody can have it all.

But . . . there is still the thought that I could have had a large, basement layout running point to point instead of looping.