Sump Pump Installation near you

The rules here are specific enough to quote back to an installer. Approved Document H says that for low-lying sites, where the ground level or the level of a basement is below the ground level at the point where the drainage connects to the public sewer, care should be taken to ensure the property is not at increased risk of flooding, and that in all such cases the sewerage undertaker should be consulted to determine the extent and likely frequency of surcharge. That consultation is the step most often skipped.

Where a valve is the answer rather than a pump, the detail matters. Anti-flooding valves should preferably be of the double valve type, should be suitable for foul water, and should have a manual closure device. A single valve should not normally serve more than one building. A notice should be provided inside the building stating that the system drains through such a valve, indicating where any manual override is, and including advice on the maintenance it needs. Drainage that is not affected by surcharge should bypass the protective measures and discharge by gravity.

Approved Document H is guidance for England. Northern Ireland uses Technical Booklet N for drainage, published by the Department of Finance in October 2012, and Scotland has its own building standards system, so confirm locally how the work will be approved and certified before it starts.

A pump specification should begin with what the pump is being asked to move and end with where it goes. For foul drainage, Approved Document H says the effluent receiving chamber should be sized to contain twenty-four hours' inflow to allow for disruption in service, with the minimum daily discharge of foul drainage taken as 150 litres per head per day for domestic use, and that in all pumped systems the controls should be arranged to optimise pump operation. Package installations for use inside buildings should conform to BS EN 12050 and be designed in accordance with BS EN 12056-4.

For groundwater, the sizing question is different but no less real: how much water arrives in the worst weather you have actually seen, how quickly, and what the pump does when it arrives faster than that. BS 8102, the British Standard code of practice for protection of below ground structures against water ingress, is the benchmark a drained system is judged against, and a drained system that nobody can maintain has not met it.

Then settle the discharge point in writing. Ask where the pipe goes, at what level it joins, whether it is protected against the water coming back, and what the fallback is when the mains supply fails. LokalMatch is how you reach the people who will answer that: describe the basement or the below-ground room once, say what water you have seen and when, add your postcode, and installers covering your area get in touch. They pay for the requests. LokalMatch does not design or install anything, sets no prices, and does not vet, rank or recommend any firm, so the questions about sizing, discharge and servicing are still yours to put.

The most common serious error is sending groundwater or surface water into a foul sewer. Section 106 of the Water Industry Act 1991 gives an owner the right to connect drains to the public sewer, but it restricts what may be discharged: where separate sewers exist for foul water and surface water, foul water may not go into the surface water sewer, and surface water may not be discharged into a sewer provided for foul water without the undertaker's approval. A pump wired up to push a continuous flow of groundwater into a foul drain is both a compliance problem and a good way to overload the system in heavy rain.

The building regulations point the same way for rainwater. Requirement H3 says rainwater must discharge, in order of priority, to an adequate soakaway or other adequate infiltration system, or where that is not reasonably practicable to a watercourse, or where that is not reasonably practicable to a sewer. Surface water drainage should discharge to a soakaway or other infiltration system where practicable, and a discharge to a watercourse may require consent and may have its rate limited.

There are responsibilities on the other side too. Scottish Water's position is that the removal of surface water or ground water is normally the responsibility of the owner of the land at the source of the problem, or the local council where that land is public. In other words, a pump that simply moves your water onto someone else's ground is not a solution, and may create a dispute you cannot pump your way out of.

A pumped system has a single point of failure that a gravity drain does not: electricity. Ask at the design stage what happens during a power cut, whether a battery backup or a second pump forms part of the specification, and how long the receiving chamber's stored capacity buys you. The twenty-four-hour sizing rule for foul effluent chambers exists precisely because service can be disrupted.

Surcharge is the other emergency. Combined and rainwater sewers are designed to surcharge in heavy rainfall, meaning the water level in the manhole rises above the top of the pipe, and some foul sewers take rainwater and surcharge too. That is normal behaviour in the public system and abnormal only when it pushes back into a building, which is exactly what pumping and anti-flooding valves are there to prevent.

If waste water does come back into a below-ground room, stop using water in the house, keep people away from the contaminated area, and report it to your water and sewerage company as well as your insurer. Where a company's sewer has flooded a property, clean-up is part of what it does; compensation is a separate question that turns on liability, and severe weather and blockages caused by what other people put down the drain are usually outside it.

A pump is the right answer when the water has nowhere else to go: a basement below the sewer, a drained cavity system that is working as designed, a lightwell that cannot drain by gravity. In those cases pumping is not a workaround, it is the design, and the building regulations assume it.

It is the wrong answer when the water is arriving because of something fixable above ground. Blocked gutters and downpipes, a gully that has silted up, ground that falls towards the wall, a cracked drain leaking into the surrounding soil, or surface water running off a neighbouring driveway all produce basement water that a pump will faithfully move for years without ever addressing the cause, at the price of running constantly and failing early.

The test of a good survey is whether anybody asked where the water comes from before quoting for equipment to move it. If the answer is a pump on the first visit, with no discussion of the gutters, the gullies, the drainage around the building or the levels outside, get a second opinion before the chamber is dug.