Good luck. I had a downed tree trunk take out my power & phone lines for a week this summer, in addition to crunching two fences and doing some other cosmetic damage. Fortunately I made out very well on my insurance claim - they gave me a sizeable generator allowance even though I just toughed it out.
Fortunately (I guess) the wife and I were in NYC during this particular storm. I guess it was pretty nasty here in Ann Arbor for a while, and there are still houses without power in town. As nearly as I can tell, though, my house never lost power at all–at least none of the clocks reset, and I called my answering machine the next day and it picked up fine.
Gonna do something here I don’t normally do: mention a company name. When we bought this house in A2 seven years ago, the sellers conveniently neglected to mention that the basement has serious water issues. Legally they should have, but they didn’t, and the inspector didn’t catch it somehow (I really considered suing him, but finally decided there was little point). The idiot sellers had built a sub-ground deck–quite large, like 24x18–and it channeled water down right into the basement, which was finished as a master suite.
So, over the next 2-3 years, we had at least 4 instances where our basement got 1-3 inches of water in it. SE Michigan has a recurring weather phenomenon they call “January thaw”. Most winters, sometime between Christmas and the end of January, we typically get a few days when the temperature bounces up into the 40s or even 50s, and all the snow melts in just a couple of days. This is often accompanied by rain. Basements throughout the area flood, and sewers back up, and the whole place is a mess. Of course, our insurance didn’t want to cover any damage, because we couldn’t prove the damage was caused by faulty pipes or anything. We ended up having to tear up carpet, cut drywall out, and rent huge fans to try and blow-dry the areas before bad mold set in.
So, after dealing with this for way too long, we finally decided to bite the bullet and get professionals to look at the thing. We had several different companies come in and propose solutions, and eventually we went with a company called Everdry, out of Toledo. It cost me close to $14,000, but they put in a 3-part draining and drying system, along with two sumps, 3 sump-pumps, an excess run-off system, and a dehumidification system.
Its been 4 years now, almost, since we had that done, and by golly, we haven’t had a drop of water in the basement since then. The system has a lifetime warranty for damages as well as replacement or fixing of the system if it fails. We just have to maintain the battery backup and keep an eye on things.
Probably the best $14k I ever spent. We weathered–pardon the pun–this storm last weekend, where we had over a foot of snow in the yard melt in basically one day, plus all the rain that came with the storm MachFive details, and my basement stayed freaking dry. So thank you, Everdry!
All, of this basement water talk is interesting to me because, yeah, the house I bought in August gets seep as well. Because of the way the house is dormered there’s no real good place for downspouts so I’m thinking of trying those non-gutter things that deflect the water away from the house.
In the meantime, I’m also getting seep from snowmelt. There is a sump pump but the guide that keeps it verticle was not secured at the bottom of the well. We discovered this when we went away during the weekend this fall during a massive rainstorm and came back to 3 inches of water. Fortunately, knowing the basement had the potential for water, we’ve kept everything elevated off the ground.
Like a jackass, I kept putting off fixing the sump pump so, during the big ice storm, when we got about 2 inches of slush, the basement flooded again. I could manually kick the pump on but it was refilling too fast to fix. Finally, when it started to slow down, I managed to fix it, laying on the soaking wet floor reaching down into the sump well as far as my elbows in freezing cold water. Brutal. I was boiling water and pouring it in the well with the icy water to give myself enough time to get the job done.
Since then, the sump pump is covering us nicely so no flooding but I still don’t like the seep at various spots. We looked at a house with one of those $10k drainage systems and it was nice but at that price it would kill all of our home improvement projects for the next two years so I’m thinking we’ll live with it for now and maybe I’ll try improving the drainage myself this spring/summer by grading with clean fill or digging out a trench around the foundation and laying drainage pipe.
That’s 1/3 of the system we have now. They went down below the frost line outside–so roughly 3 feet–and put a layer of plasticy tar stuff, then gravel on top of that, then pipe with vents in it on the bottom side. All sloped toward one of the two drywell/sumps outside (one on each of the two downhill sides of the house). Then they came inside, cut out the drywall up about 3 inches around the entire basement floor, cut out the studs, then jackhammered down about 6-8 inches, and ran gravel and then pipe again, running downhill to three sump pumps, all along the downhill edge of the basement. Two of the three pumps also have battery backup that should last up to 24 hours in a power outage. And the outside sumps are designed to flood over and downhill–away from the house–in the event they ever fill completely up too fast to soak down.
Then the final piece is a ventilation/humidifier combination in the basement vented out the front side of the house, to keep things dry enough down there to prevent mold growing.
Yeah, it was a ton of money, and I’ll be paying it off for a while on a home improvement loan, but given the choice between that, or (as you noted) standing or lying in freezing cold water all night long trying to keep the portable sump pumps pumping and the garden hoses attached to those pumps from freezing solid, I’ll take the home improvement loan.
Thankfully, no water intrusion yet. My neighbors have been generous enough to let me run my sump pump off their generators yesterday and today, and that 10 minutes of running was enough to clear out all of the water that accumulated the previous 24 hours.
Our basement’s pretty solid as far as moisture goes. There’s two cracks in the foundation that dribble a bit when we get a TON of rain, and I think we’ll be able to get those taken care of with a high-pressure injection repair. Otherwise, there’s no humidity issues during the summer, which is amazing in its own right.
The only thing I’d consider getting is a water-powered backup for the sump pump, and I might get the electrical system set up so I’ll be able to backfeed it from a generator or power inverter the next time we have a problem.
But no power yet, sadly. This suuuuuuuucks.