I will start by saying I’m not that kind of engineer and you shouldn’t take anything here as advice. It’s a comical re-telling of my mishaps and probably not even to building code.

We did this weeks ago but I’m so lazy so I’m only posting about it how.

We wanted a way to disconnect the pump from the discharge pipe in order to remove the pump from the pit. We decided to try figuring this out one pump at a time, and start with the pump that sucks worse. I wasn’t able to disconnect the existing hose/fittings when I tried earlier, but it turns out it wasn’t actually that impossible to do if you were not worried about breaking anything, lol.

General piping arrangement

This is the before:

This is the after:

This shows what not to do in terms of arranging your fittings:

In that image, you will notice there is no check valve. I didn’t think I needed it because I thought this discharge point had an air gap before it joined to where my downspout drains. I was wrong about the discharge point, and ended up making a run to the hardware store late in the afternoon and didn’t take photos because I was angry at myself.

Without the check valve it was running 90 seconds on, 90 seconds off. With the check valve it ran 90 seconds on, 4 mins off. A massive improvement. It would also prevent the ditch in front of my house from backfilling the basement. I still don’t know where this pump discharges to, but in the fall when things die back I will go exploring.

I’ll describe the correct(er?) arrangement below, from pump to wall:

  1. Male NPT threaded check valve threads into pump, with a smooth fitting on the other side.
  2. 1.5" to 1.5" flex coupling
  3. 1.5" to 1.5" barbed coupling, with one end in the flex coupling and the other connected to the corrugated hose with the adjustable strap
  4. 1.5" Flexible hose
  5. 1.5" to 1.5" barbed coupling, with one end the hose (attached with strap) and the other end in the next flex coupling
  6. 1.5" to 1.25" flex coupling to connect to the 90 degree 1.25" barbed fitting in the wall.

This is what the fitting at the wall looked like:

Not so bad right? THIS IS CALLED FORESHADOWING.

Now for the cleaning

Here is what the pump and pit looked like before:

It looks so much cleaner than last time to me, thanks to all the cleaning we did. You can kind of see how the float might be rubbing against the discharge pipe, which is what I was hoping the flexible hose would help prevent.

The next two photos show it better, when removed from the pit and in the bucket:

These photos show the material that built up on the check valve.

Here is the suction side of the pump:

We didn’t crack her open because I didn’t care that much. We placed the pump in the bucket with cleating agent and let her sit there. I later went in with a brush and cleaned the casing up a bit. I did not take after photos because I was filthy.

We also cleaned the risers, which were not bolted down in any way:

It ended up working well enough for a week or so, but then we started having problems again and it wasn’t keeping up with the backwash.

I’m going to make a separate post with what we tried/learned today and I have some future plans as well, which are to return to the hard piped discharge from the pump. The pump ended up flopping around in the pit too much when starting and stopping and that’s messing with the float. I am going to create the assembly (mix of abs and more flex hose) and then install it all at once, rather than re-using pieces from this set up, so that we have a “spare” ready to go if needed.