Strange Noise . . .

Ok, so I get up this morning and make my way down to my study in the basement. To do so I walk past the laundry room and hear the water running. Strange. Sounds like the washing machine, but it's early so no one up but me. The water noise is coming from the sump pump hole.

Oh no.

For those of you who do not have sump pumps, let me tell you this: there is no good scenario for what is happening at this point. None. Nada. This is bad no matter how you slice it.

So I gently move the cover to the sump hole and water starts squirting out. Okay, it just got worse. Images of my basement flooding are running through my head. So I unplug the pump and remove the cover . . . and thankfully, the water is not running out of the hole. This is probably the best case scenario! One of the couplings connecting the pump output to the output pipe had come loose and the water was squirting out of there. But what caused it to all of a sudden come loose?

I grab some buckets and bail the water out of the hole. It is as warm as bath water! Our pump must have been running quite some time. My guess is that with all of our extremely cold weather, the line has frozen somewhere and the pump just kept running and running, trying to push out the water until the coupling came apart under the pressure. Then the pump kept pumping but the water never left the hole, i.e. infinite loop.

So, I'll keep an eye on it for now and see what happens. Reminds me of another story when I heard water running in the middle of the night . . . but that's a story for another day. :-)

UPDATE: Confirmed line was clogged (and assumed frozen), so ran a new, temporary line to the waste sink in the laundry room. So now the water can get pumped out until the spring thaw, when I'll remove the temporary line and reattach the permanent one. (My wife will just have to watch her step until then!) And now I'll have the emergency line ready for it this ever happens again.