New to Sump Pump Systems

[WPH1017]

I recently purchased a vacation home which has an interior french drain system with a sump pump and battery back-up. The system seems to be working just fine. After all of October's rain, and given our proximity to the ocean, the water table remains high. Our sump pump is cycling quite frequently, and the discharge area in the yard still shows a high water level when I look through the grate. I was wondering if it made any sense to have the outside water collection pit drained. Is there such a service? Since we don't live at the house, I wanted to prolong the life of the sump pump. We did have the system fully inspected in September. I am just not used to sump pumps and get nervous hearing it cycle so often (every 2 minutes or so) All advice is appreciated!!

[JacobPM]

Hi - it was good to talk to you through live chat in detail. For the readers I'm going to answer your questions here too.


It's important to understand that if a pump is cycling every 2 minutes, it's pretty normal. There are sump pumps in our customers homes that cycle almost every 10-15 seconds.

Dry wells at the end of discharge lines are important to help the water to seek it's normal path back into the soil at a natural pace. This is only a problem if the dry well is allowing water collected in it to back up into the discharge line. This gets messy around winter when the water can freeze and break the line as well as generally keeping the water from flowing properly out of the home.

Any system, regardless of the company, should be inspected once a year.

Our service department is always happy to help anyone with their system, pumps, or drainage questions, even if they have someone else’s system installed.