Reporting in from Exton PA here.
Power out since 10pm last night. Despite diligent effort to try and get the generator working practically all day yesterday, it was non functional. So I tried to bail the water manually from the sump pump and dump it in the sink. This worked for only a couple hours and then it was coming in faster than I could get rid of it. An inch and a half of water in the finished basement. No trees down or tornadoes (there was a warning).
I'm guessing we won't have power till Tuesday. Which means the fridge won't last much longer.
Wow. I was always a little jealous of people that had basements. Now I'm not.
The whole house is 18" above the ground, and the property is 4' above the street. French drains under and around the house send everything to the street, the drains from the roof are fed into additional french drains that send that off the property as well. This isn't a standard installation, and my contractor said it was overkill, but I know my property isn't going to flood.
Sounds decent although 18" is actually the min. height for a crawl space. Make sure your drains are clear of debris that may go down your gutters or they will do you no good. Definitely useless overkill though since you don't have a basement to protect and your house is relatively high above the street. Do you have issues with extreme flooding problems where you live?
Except that all remains to be seen.
Doug- Sorry to hear about your troubles. Hope you get everything all cleaned up soon.
Don't sour on having a basement. I love how they are always comfortable and offer a place of almost complete solitude from the outside. They're especially great in the summer if you have the occasional power outage. Nice & comfortable, even on a super hot day. Computer equipment love the nice cool environment and I'm sure you know any area you have dedicated to storage down there is a great place for servers etc. Not sure if you lost power or not. I think you just had a bad water connection for your pump? But if you don't have one of these already, you should definitely invest in one or similar. It will go for a week or so if you happen to lose power and will even function as a primary pump in the event that your main pump has some type of mechanical failure. Just need to replace the battery every 7 years or so for safety. I thought about one of the water pressure type pumps in the past but decided against them. I think they only pump about 1/7 the water they use and will not work if you lose your water pressure (like we did during the blackout of 2003).
Good luck to you.
I feel your pain Handruin. But let me add this: State Farm said I'm not covered for any of the damage.
I only waist my time during lunch.I would of rather them not even be there so that emergency crews wouldn't have to waist their time rescuing reporters lives to cover this.
I only waist my time during lunch.
I only waist my time during lunch.
I'm glad you had nothing better to do than to point out that I made a grammatical error.
As far as insurance, generally home insurance doesn't cover acts of nature, war, terrorism, sabotage, rioting, and a few other exceptions. Sometimes you can get a rider on your policy to cover storm damage. Even then, there are usually exceptions like hurricanes and tornadoes. Bottom line, based on past experience, there really doesn't seem to be much which home insurance actually does cover. When we had the sewer backing up, they said only freshwater flooding was covered, and then only if it wasn't caused by tropical storms or broken plumbing. Of course, they offer all kinds of riders for $$$.
That's not a grammatical error. It's just a regular error. wneddnce:
Why are they not covering your damages?
It was my understanding that no private insurance covers floods and that the only way to get flood coverage was through the federal govt.
Indeed I will, once I find it. It will be a few days of cleanup before I can go through stuff. Last night we cleared out the first third of the basement, still have the other half of the main section and then my office to do. Heating and cooling guy is coming to look at the heat pump & A/C unit as they are not really working. I'm hoping the bottom of my water heater hasn't been damaged by this and won't eventually rust out and spring a leak at the bottom.Will, check your insurance contract yourself
I was feigning pedantry. But I wouldn't consider something to be a grammatical error unless it broke a rule of grammar. To me it is simply a spelling error that happens to be a homophone. But I'm open to argument.