This quick and inexpensive drainage solution may help you rid yourself of a flooded basement. If you have water coming from behind your wall, put a hose on the ground outside your house and run it along the top of your walls. About six feet from the wall, stick some PVC pipe into the ground to create a water outlet. This will create a drain that prevents that water from entering your home again, at least until the snow melts in springtime.
The snow this past winter was so deep that only about three feet of my wall’s top were above ground level, but even that part was standing in about two feet of snow. If you run the hose too high, too low, or outside the wall’s top, you won’t be able to direct water from behind your house. If you can find a suitable location on your home’s top, that spot is where you need to have the PVC pipe outlet.
The water source behind my wall was a small drain beneath my sump pump. So I had to put PVC pipe alongside my upper-floor ceiling and then run the hose along that edge of the ceiling. The hose was about 6 feet away from the wall for this short distance (about 10 inches), so I needed a length of pipe about 28 inches long.
You removed a section of 24-inch PVC pipe and a section of threaded PVC adapter from an old irrigation system I had lying around. The end of the pipe that fits inside the hose attaches to the threaded PVC adapter. I ran about five feet of hose from the threaded adapter, then cut the hose with a hacksaw.
Place these PVC parts inside the wall to locate them at one end of your installation, then shove them all up into your ceiling along one side, not just sticking them up into your ceiling so much as going in about halfway and turning them 90 degrees, so that they are laying flat on top of your ceiling joists. You ran my pipe alongside my bathroom’s upper-floor edge. How do you know which way to go? If your bathroom is on one side of the house, run your hose along that side’s upper-floor ceiling’s edge, and you’ll have the hose run outside your wall for about six feet.
Conclusion
You’ll have to be creative with PVC pipe and fittings. If you want to do a job right, then you need materials made for the job. Padman Water Solutions is one job that requires custom-made materials. Still, you can do the job if you have a big enough area. And if you time it right, you’ll be able to do the job before it gets too cold. You need to consider your wood flooring and bathrooms when doing a job like this. My upstairs bathroom is about 30 feet from where I installed my PVC pipe outlet and drain hose. The PVC pipe came up just under my bathroom’s upper-floor ceiling edge, so I could easily connect the two without any problems from that distance.
