Need time-sensitive sump pump help.

Post date: 2018-01-13 03:04:02

My sump pump seems to be broken, (it's constantly running), no plumbers available until Monday and my area faces rapidly melting snow and rain in the next 48 hours. I have a plan but maybe you can poke holes in it or provide an alternative solution?

So the deal is, my sump pump is constantly running, even when there's no water for it to clear. It's not the float switch, I suspect it's a problem with the pump itself, it's about 6 years old and gets heavy use.

We're about to get a *lot* of water due to rain and melting snow, so I'm pretty concerned for the state of my basement which is (very) prone to flooding. Here are my options as far as I can see:

- Call a plumber. Yep, and due to the recent brutal cold, plumbers in the Boston area are fixing pipes for the next 3 days. No-one is able to get here until Monday.

- Just keep the thing running. This is the easiest plan, but my concern is that it will result in the motor eventually burning out, which is quite possible because when it clears, the pump is no longer submerged in water.

- Manually unplug the pump, then wait an hour and then plug it back in. This is my current MO, but not really sustainable over the next 48 hours.

So my last thought was I could get a timer at the hardware store, this will cut off the power, switch it back on periodically and basically substitute as the float switch. The question I have here is do timers even exist that can switch off an on every 60 minutes (or even less) and is there anything else I'm not thinking of?

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