(Sorry about the picture quality. I used a cell phone camera while holding a flashlight and trying not to drop my phone into the abyss under the house.)
The sump pump lives in our crawl space and its sole function is to pump water (like melting snow) from underneath our house so it doesn't flood and damage my clothes. Does that make sense? I hope it does because I have scoured the Internet trying to understand what this thing does and how it needs to be maintained and still don't get it.
During the walk-through, before we moved in, the landlord lifted the carpet and trap-door saying, "Here's the sump pump." David must have been poking around in some other room so I just nodded like I had seen thousands of sump pumps before while in my head I was screaming, "WTF is a sump pump? OMG! Is that icky crawl space where I will have to hide if there is a tornado? Is that a spider?" We don't have sump pumps in Southern California. There is no water to pump out from under the house because So-Cal is always in a drought.
Welcome to another fascinating (stressful) aspect of Midwestern living. Had I been our landlords I would have never rented a house to a couple like David and me. We have no idea how to take care of a house especially a house that comes with all this extra shit like furnaces, sump pumps and pipes that can freeze.
I assume our pump is working. I've never heard it turn on but the house hasn't flooded so that's a good sign, right? David asked one of his home-owning co-workers and they think our pump is set to turn on when the bucket thingy gets really full. Another friend keeps telling me to dump some more water in it force it to turn on. I am so not doing that. Knowing my luck that's when the pump will decide to malfunction and then I will be sitting in water until David gets home to yell at me for messing with things neither of us know anything about.
Bored? Read all about sump pumps here.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment