Down in the sumps...

Yesterday while hard at working saving the universe from alien domination, I got an email from the wife that she was doing laundry and the sump pump (which the washer drains into) was not running and now there was water EVERYWHERE. Wonderful, just wonderful. Luckily, the evil alien horde is a very honorable bunch and they allowed me to work from home the rest of the day, and resume the good fight the next morning.

After racing home at 2x light speed, my first diagnosis was that the sump pump was plugged in, the outlet was live and the sump pump appeared dead.

Fishing around in the sump I managed to drag the pump to the surface, disconnect it from the drain pipe and plop it into a handy bucket for traveling outdoors with.

Outdoors - my worst fears seemed realized when I filled the bucket with water - plugged the pump in and only got a slight hum in return. Unplugging the pump and turning it over revealed what was wrong - it had inhaled about two heads worth of hair...

My wife tends to wash her hair in the same wash tub that the washer empties into - and her long hair was just too much for the pump to handle.

After disassembling the pump and cleaning up the impeller - I put it all back together - plopped it into the bucket - crossed my fingers and plugged it in.... Success! A plume of water shot out of the bucket spraying everything in sight :-)

After that - it was a quick trip back inside the house and down into the basement where I quickly lowered the pump and re-connected it to the outlet pipe. Just as I was about to plug it back into the wall outlet - I realized that standing there in water up to my ankles, with soaking wet hands and arms - not to mention a soggy power cord from laying in the water - that my plugging it back in just then might not be the wisest thing I have done all day...

Remembering some safety tips from a electric shop class teach in high school, I instead went to the breaker and shut the circuit off to the pump - walked back to the pump and plugged it in - and then re-enabled the circuit.

In a matter of seconds, the pump did it's job and all that was left was literally some mopping up.

In afterthought - I *probably* would not have gotten electrocuted since electricity tends to take the path of least resistance, and having to travel through the water would probably have been a much higher resistance than through the wire. However - when gambling - always make sure you can afford to lose ;-)