Meh, it's raining here today. Yes, it does actually rain in Colorado occassionally, but I can take some comfort in the fact that I know it is snowing in the foothills and mountains at elevations above 6,000 feet (or about 500 feet higher than my house). I actually like rain every now and again, but I am more of a thunder-boomer fan and this constant gloomy cold drizzly stuff we have been getting since last night is just downright unpleasant.
When we get thunderstorms, it usually rains like hell for a half hour or so, you get some wind (tornadoes are rare), a good light show, some big ka-booms, and then everything calms down again and the sun comes back out while the rainbows put on their finest colors. Generally this is not a problem (unless hail is involved or the power goes out). But when it rains slowly and constantly like today, it saturates the ground - and when the ground gets saturated in my yard, it decides to pool in one of my basement window wells. If it rains long enough, eventually the water will build up to the point that it will start to leak in from around the window sill. Not good, but it could be worse (there are 3 other wells that will stay dry, I just have the one trouble-maker).
This is not entirely unexpected because it has occured about once or twice a year since I bought this house (and May is our rainiest month). My usual remediation plan is to use my shop-vac's pump feature to suck the water out before it gets high enough to infiltrate around the window, but I do have to keep vigilant when it starts happening because the well will refill to the fail-safe point about once an hour once it starts going. This routine usually works pretty well since it does not happen all that frequently, but it can definitely get old when I am still doing it at 1 or 2 in the morning. Plus the shop-vac is cumbersome, noisy, and bit of a pain to get setup for pump duty. Meh, again.
So when I woke up this morning and checked our "well," I was not terribly surprised to find that the water level had risen to about 1" below the bottom of the window. Having just suffered a major pain in my patoot with a broken drain line that flooded the basement floor a couple of months ago, I was not at all amused at the potential for more water down there today. Nor was I all that thrilled at the idea of having to possibly endure another marathon session with the shop-vac. Triple-meh.
So this time I decided to do something different and headed off to the Home Depot at 7:45 this morning (did you know that it is not very crowded there at all at this hour on a Tuesday? It was actually quite a pleasant experience - no parking hassles, now crowded aisles, no lines - just me and the contractors). There I plunked down $150 for a small submersible pump with a built-in sensor that automatically starts the pump-motor when water is detected, and shuts itself off once it has sucked it back down to a depth of about 1/4 inch.
All I had to do was connect it to a garden hose, place it in the window-well, plug it in, and watch it do its thing for a couple of run/stop/restart cycles to make sure that it was actually working as advertised. The well has already been sucked dry and seems to be staying that way. I can hear the pump cycle every 10 minutes or so, run for about 5 seconds, and then it goes back to sleep - with zero interaction on my part. I now have enough confidence in it that I could probably get by just forgetting about it until the weather passes (but since I'm so paranoid about water + basement combinations now, I'll still be checking on it every now and again just to keep my comfort level as high as possible - wouldn't want to get complacent now would I?).
Total time invested in my latest "water event"? A couple of hours, max. Not quite what I had in mind for spending some of that "economic stimulus" tax-rebate money we got last week, but it did buy me some precious peace of mind. And at this rate, I figure that the somewhat pricey little pump will have actually paid for itself in the form of "my-time-saved" by the end of the day (or at least by 1 or 2 tomorrow morning when I am not having to babysit the shop-vac).
I am thinking the next house I buy will be on stilts though. I've had it with "water features" in basements...