Water In The Basement
Feb. 11th, 2008 11:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jayfurrFor the last five or six months we've had water in our basement, coming in from behind the wall where our oil tank is set into the wall.
Our oil tank is a big ol' thing, inside the basement with a fill pipe coming in from outside. One day in October (I think) I was down in the basement for some reason and realized we had a mini lake spreading out from around the oil tank, ten feet in diameter, at least. A lot of cardboard storage boxes got ruined in the process; they'd been sitting in the water for however many days the problem had been going on and we hadn't noticed in time to stop them from becoming completely sodden. I wound up throwing out a couple of boxes of pointless old keepsakes that I evidently hadn't needed because they'd been in the basement all that time getting ignored, and now here they were soaked and mildewed.
We moved all the surviving boxes out to the garage and soaked up the water and then started trying to figure out why we were getting infiltration into the basement. It was obvious that the water was coming from behind the oil tank; the tank was set into the wall and the flow was coming down the wall from behind it, pooling on the floor underneath it, and then heading off in whatever direction gravity took it. We developed a twice-daily ritual of spreading ratty beach and bath towels under the oil tank and next to it. If we changed towels every morning before work and every evening upon coming home from work we could keep ahead of the weeping water, more or less.
We tried going around our backyard filling in gaps in the soil against the house with rock and sand and soil, hoping that we could stop water from pooling against the wall and making its way through, but that had absolutely no effect.
We also tried getting waterproofing paint for the masonry inside the basement, hoping that would stop the water from making its way through whatever micro cracks and fissures had opened up in the foundation wall, but it was impossible to get the paint to stay on the wall in some spots due to the constant weeping of water from behind the tank.
I asked around at work and was told that other homeowners had cracks open up and that they'd had to excavate down to the cracks from outside and fill the cracks with expanding foam. We didn't particularly want to do that if there was another option, but before we really had time to fully consider what to do next winter set in and at that point we decided it was best to just wait until spring.
We thought that just maybe the cold winter would cause the flow to stop as the groundwater froze, but that never happened. It kept right on flowing no matter what the conditions were outside.
Annoying and creepy, right?
In what we thought was an unrelated matter, we also had a week back in November or so when we had water coming from under the dishwasher. Not a lot; just a little tiny pool that looked just like someone had unloaded a load of wet dishes. Only it kept coming back; we'd mop it up and then there'd be more water the next day. Just a little bit. Then after a while it stopped, and we breathed a sigh of relief at the thought that we wouldn't need an appliance repairman to come in.
Well, a week ago we did several loads of dishes all on the same day, all part of our massive baking-with-sourdough experiment. The next day, we had a LOT of water coming out from under the dishwasher, or perhaps from under the cabinet under the sink, next to the dishwasher. The weird thing was that the stuff under the sink looked and felt perfectly dry, so we couldn't figure where the water was coming from. My theory was that it was all from the dishwasher but that it was first flowing over to the under-the-sink area, then out into the room.
While I was out of town, in Glens Falls for work, Carole had to add a towel-on-the-kitchen-floor to the towels-in-the-basement routine. I was very unhappy about all this going on and had visions of rotting floorboards.
Finally, Saturday afternoon I sort of snapped and got out screwdrivers and a hammer and pulled the baseboards away from under the sink, hoping to see where the water was coming from. There was a lot of water under the cabinet, but I couldn't tell precisely where it was coming from: from under the dishwasher or from somewhere else. I summoned Carole to try to find out and she brought all her tools and socket sets and wrenches up and took the kickplate off the front of the washer and peered under. No clue.
So we took EVERYTHING out from under the sink, all the cleaning products and hand towels and stuff, and Carole set to poking about. The fact that the stuff we were taking out was all dry added to the mystery. Where the heck was all this water coming from?
Finally, she reached up under the faucet and put her hand on the hot water feed line, bringing water up from the water heater in the basement. It was wet. Very wet. Water was flowing out of it and running straight down the pipe back down under the cabinet and causing the kitchen lake. Somehow none of it was getting on anything in the under-the-sink cabinet, but plenty was getting under the cabinet itself. A slow leak would do that, I guess, where a faster leak would have sprayed out a bit and gotten all the towels and cleansers wet.
So she did what she could to tighten things up, and then had a thought: what if the water was continuing down from the kitchen into the basement, along the pipe, into the wall, and then emerging from behind the oil tank? I first thought that couldn't be the case because I thought I knew where the return pipes from the sink came through the floor, but Carole pointed out that the water appeared to be flowing along the outside of the supply pipe, not the return pipes.
So once Carole had finished under the sink we dried the area under the oil tank very very carefully and then took the towels away and waited.
An hour later: no water.
Three hours later: no water.
Next morning: no water.
So much for the cracks-in-the-basement-foundation-wall theory. It apparently goes all the way back to when Carole installed our new kitchen faucet last summer. Something came a bit loose after a few months and that's where all our troubles began.
Wish we'd put all this together a hell of a lot sooner. The slow nature of the flow and the fact that we never saw or felt any water under the sink is what faked us out. It behaved just like a hydrostatic-pressure-caused leak through the wall, based on what I've read, but the whole time it was water running right down the outside of the same small pipe it'd come up, right back into the basement, and out onto the floor. If the leak hadn't gotten a bit more vigorous and caused minor flooding in the kitchen, I'd never have gotten exasperated enough to start taking the kitchen cabinetry apart looking for the source of the flow and Carole would never have put her hand on the supply pipe and said "hey, this pipe's all wet."
Okay, so we're idiots, but still, you have no idea how good it feels knowing that our 'basement leak' is a thing of the past.
Our oil tank is a big ol' thing, inside the basement with a fill pipe coming in from outside. One day in October (I think) I was down in the basement for some reason and realized we had a mini lake spreading out from around the oil tank, ten feet in diameter, at least. A lot of cardboard storage boxes got ruined in the process; they'd been sitting in the water for however many days the problem had been going on and we hadn't noticed in time to stop them from becoming completely sodden. I wound up throwing out a couple of boxes of pointless old keepsakes that I evidently hadn't needed because they'd been in the basement all that time getting ignored, and now here they were soaked and mildewed.
We moved all the surviving boxes out to the garage and soaked up the water and then started trying to figure out why we were getting infiltration into the basement. It was obvious that the water was coming from behind the oil tank; the tank was set into the wall and the flow was coming down the wall from behind it, pooling on the floor underneath it, and then heading off in whatever direction gravity took it. We developed a twice-daily ritual of spreading ratty beach and bath towels under the oil tank and next to it. If we changed towels every morning before work and every evening upon coming home from work we could keep ahead of the weeping water, more or less.
We tried going around our backyard filling in gaps in the soil against the house with rock and sand and soil, hoping that we could stop water from pooling against the wall and making its way through, but that had absolutely no effect.
We also tried getting waterproofing paint for the masonry inside the basement, hoping that would stop the water from making its way through whatever micro cracks and fissures had opened up in the foundation wall, but it was impossible to get the paint to stay on the wall in some spots due to the constant weeping of water from behind the tank.
I asked around at work and was told that other homeowners had cracks open up and that they'd had to excavate down to the cracks from outside and fill the cracks with expanding foam. We didn't particularly want to do that if there was another option, but before we really had time to fully consider what to do next winter set in and at that point we decided it was best to just wait until spring.
We thought that just maybe the cold winter would cause the flow to stop as the groundwater froze, but that never happened. It kept right on flowing no matter what the conditions were outside.
Annoying and creepy, right?
In what we thought was an unrelated matter, we also had a week back in November or so when we had water coming from under the dishwasher. Not a lot; just a little tiny pool that looked just like someone had unloaded a load of wet dishes. Only it kept coming back; we'd mop it up and then there'd be more water the next day. Just a little bit. Then after a while it stopped, and we breathed a sigh of relief at the thought that we wouldn't need an appliance repairman to come in.
Well, a week ago we did several loads of dishes all on the same day, all part of our massive baking-with-sourdough experiment. The next day, we had a LOT of water coming out from under the dishwasher, or perhaps from under the cabinet under the sink, next to the dishwasher. The weird thing was that the stuff under the sink looked and felt perfectly dry, so we couldn't figure where the water was coming from. My theory was that it was all from the dishwasher but that it was first flowing over to the under-the-sink area, then out into the room.
While I was out of town, in Glens Falls for work, Carole had to add a towel-on-the-kitchen-floor to the towels-in-the-basement routine. I was very unhappy about all this going on and had visions of rotting floorboards.
Finally, Saturday afternoon I sort of snapped and got out screwdrivers and a hammer and pulled the baseboards away from under the sink, hoping to see where the water was coming from. There was a lot of water under the cabinet, but I couldn't tell precisely where it was coming from: from under the dishwasher or from somewhere else. I summoned Carole to try to find out and she brought all her tools and socket sets and wrenches up and took the kickplate off the front of the washer and peered under. No clue.
So we took EVERYTHING out from under the sink, all the cleaning products and hand towels and stuff, and Carole set to poking about. The fact that the stuff we were taking out was all dry added to the mystery. Where the heck was all this water coming from?
Finally, she reached up under the faucet and put her hand on the hot water feed line, bringing water up from the water heater in the basement. It was wet. Very wet. Water was flowing out of it and running straight down the pipe back down under the cabinet and causing the kitchen lake. Somehow none of it was getting on anything in the under-the-sink cabinet, but plenty was getting under the cabinet itself. A slow leak would do that, I guess, where a faster leak would have sprayed out a bit and gotten all the towels and cleansers wet.
So she did what she could to tighten things up, and then had a thought: what if the water was continuing down from the kitchen into the basement, along the pipe, into the wall, and then emerging from behind the oil tank? I first thought that couldn't be the case because I thought I knew where the return pipes from the sink came through the floor, but Carole pointed out that the water appeared to be flowing along the outside of the supply pipe, not the return pipes.
So once Carole had finished under the sink we dried the area under the oil tank very very carefully and then took the towels away and waited.
An hour later: no water.
Three hours later: no water.
Next morning: no water.
So much for the cracks-in-the-basement-foundation-wall theory. It apparently goes all the way back to when Carole installed our new kitchen faucet last summer. Something came a bit loose after a few months and that's where all our troubles began.
Wish we'd put all this together a hell of a lot sooner. The slow nature of the flow and the fact that we never saw or felt any water under the sink is what faked us out. It behaved just like a hydrostatic-pressure-caused leak through the wall, based on what I've read, but the whole time it was water running right down the outside of the same small pipe it'd come up, right back into the basement, and out onto the floor. If the leak hadn't gotten a bit more vigorous and caused minor flooding in the kitchen, I'd never have gotten exasperated enough to start taking the kitchen cabinetry apart looking for the source of the flow and Carole would never have put her hand on the supply pipe and said "hey, this pipe's all wet."
Okay, so we're idiots, but still, you have no idea how good it feels knowing that our 'basement leak' is a thing of the past.
