For the past several months, I’ve noticed that the pit where my sump pump is has had water visibly inside it. Sometimes when it rained, water would actually overflow out. I’d had the sump pump replaced about 2 years ago, when I first moved in, so I just figured that the sewers were slow or something stupid like that. Obviuosly I don’t know very much about plumbing.
Fast forward to Tuesday night. Southern PA got hit with a really bad storm. It down-poured for hours and hours. Wednesday morning, Sayra and I left the house early to go shopping for her dress for Miami. The plan was to go to my parents house, then from there go to the outlets in Leesburg, Va. We made it about a mile down the Susquehanna Trail, when we noticed that the stream along the road was totally flooded out. This house’s whole backyard was actually one big pond.
That’s when I suddenly remembered the basement. Sayra called Fernando, who hadn’t left for school yet, and asked him to check it for us. He said that there was a lot of water and that we should turn around.
We returned home about 5 minutes later to a fully flooded basement. There was water wall-to-wall about 2 inches deep.
Luckily most of the stuff in the basement is in plastic bins, which are waterproof. There is a lot of other stuff though which got soaked. There were several suitcases, our Christmas tree, a vacuum cleaner, and some furniture which all got trashed.
I immediately called Gemcraft and they gave me a number of a plumber that they work with in the area: Groff’s Plumbing. Of course, the house is 2.5 years old now and is out of warranty, so I would have to pay out of pocket for the service.
I called Groff’s and they had a plumber out to the house within a few hours. Mike was the plumber that Groff’s had sent out and I couldn’t say enough good things about him. He was very friendly and he really took the time to explain everything to us about what had happened and what we should do in the future. If anyone from Groff’s reads this, please give a shout-out to Mike. He was awesome.
Mike had to replace the sump pump. The old one was completely shot. It had totally blown out. Once Mike had the new sump pump in and we were able to get most of the water out of the basement, we discovered what had happened.
It turns out that when the house was built, neither the construction crew (Gemcraft) nor the installation plumber (John Walker) had cleaned out the sump pit. There was a ton of construction debris in the pit, such as clamps, wood, nails, and a big plastic bag of washers and joints. This debris got stuck under the float of the old pump and caused it to keep running dry and eventually burn itself out. My pump had probably burned out months ago because it ran for 8 hours after installation. There was that much water under my house.
Mike said that he sees this a lot, although usually not as bad as mine. There is always a controversy over whose responsibility it is to clean out the pit, the builder or the plumber. The plumber doesn’t want to do it because a lot of time the construction guys are throwing trash in the pit or literally pissing down there. According to Mike, it is the responsibility of the builder to clean it out.
The bill from Groff’s was $413.00. That included $298 for the pump and installation, $65 to run and get a pump (Mike didn’t have one on his truck), and $50 for a trip charge. I begrudgingly paid the bill, with every intention to contact Gemcraft in the morning.
I called Gemcraft Thursday morning and the operator kept dumping me into Pat Moxley’s VM. Pat was the person whom I had talked to on Wednesday, but I didn’t want to leave a VM. I wanted a live person that I could talk to. I called Sayra and she looked up the name of the service manager in the binder we got when we bought the house.
I called back, entered the extension of the service manager, and was able to speak live with Brian Davis. He was nice enough I guess. I explained the situation to him. Of course, he blamed the plumber, John Walker. I saw that one coming from a mile away. He claims that it is the responsibilty of the plumber to clean and seal the pit.
He asked if there was anything written on the invoice from Groff’s that specifically mentioned construction debris. Luckily, Mike had covered all our bases and he had written clear as day that the problem was 100% the fault of the builder.
Brian asked me to fax the invoice from Groff’s over to him and he would get with his supervisor to see if they could reimburse me the $413. That was 8 hours ago and I never heard back from them!!! I’ll give you one guess who I’m calling first thing tomorrow morning. Hopefully I can get this resolved without having to take legal action, but I am not getting stuck with this bill when another company was clearly negligent.
