The cold snap we’ve been experiencing, which has kept us below freezing continuously for several weeks, has me concerned.
Our new sump pump normally pushes water out into the storm drain channels on our side of the street. Under ideal conditions, this results in water flowing down the channels across the entire width of our front yard, to the storm drain grate on the far side of our driveway.
Since then end of January, this channel has been pretty much a solid block of ice, around four inches thick.
The water has, in the last week, spilled out more into the street. It is pushing a few feet across — maybe a quarter of road’s width. I did some bailing to keep the water from pooling at a high level and backflowing into the bubble pot. Eventually, I surmised, that could lead to the whole pipe from the basement getting frozen. The only thing saving it from backing up into the basement would be the emergency release that would let water spill out all over the ground near the house.
So, I decided to attack this problem in earnest. I bought my first pickaxe and tried to chip away with it. I’m out of shape, and it was tough to break through that much ice. Over the weekend, I finally made the breakthrough, and had a complete channel dug between the sump pump pipe’s bubble pot in our yard, and the storm sewer grate.
Now our neighbors know us for my pickaxe. Grin.
I was hoping this ice channel would last a few days. Since it was narrow and relatively free of slushy debris, I hoped the water would flow freely and more quickly than it did in the wider channel normally provided by the concrete underneath. As the sump pump did its job, though, I could see water moving, but new thin layers of ice were also forming.
Sadly, the free flow was not to be. By Monday morning, the ice had refrozen almost up to the previous level I’d chipped away. By Monday evening, it was overflowing even that — somewhat of a blessing, since that meant that it was still flowing, somehow.
While chatting with one of my neighbors, I found out that we probably have a spring behind our house. This makes sense, but it’s not comforting. We probably have the lowest basement on our side of the street, so we depend upon the entire system for our sump pump to be working. Thank goodness for the new battery backup, which we needed during a power outage caused the recent ice storm in January.
Well, I better get back to bailing out our little pond, and perhaps some chipping.