Weekend Storm(s) Aftermath

The Wisdom of a Sump Pump

With a Battery Backup

Q: What's worse than biting into an apple and finding a worm?
A. Biting into an apple and finding half a worm.

What's worse than having water in your basement from one of the two(!) deluges that hit the Twin Cities last weekend?

Having water in your basement . . . and not knowing it.

For every 10 homes locally with a dehumidifier working furiously to dry out a wet basement at the moment, I guarantee that there's at least one home, vacant, with standing water right now.

And it's a good bet that the owner of that home is a bank.

Price of Neglect

What happens next depends on a couple factors:

How much water; how long it goes undetected; and the weather (specifically, the temperature).

Worst case, a home with a lot of water turns into a very large Petri dish, incubating a nasty brew of mold and microbes that make future remediation extremely expensive -- if it's possible at all.

P.S.: just because you have a sump pump doesn't necessarily mean you're protected from water in your basement.

In a huge storm -- precisely the kind likeliest to unleash a flood -- you're likely to lose power, too. Unless your sump pump has a battery backup, it's out of commission until the power comes back on.