Prius to the rescue!

New England has been hammered by a fairly vicious rain/wind
storm over the last couple of days. In spite of that, I had
been working an event all day and maybe 15 minutes after finally
getting in from it and expecting a quiet evening at home catching
up, I got this call from a friend. The gist was, "I've been
notified that my basement is flooding and the power is out so
the sump pump can't run, and I'm still on my two week vacay
in ... Scotland." A tree had apparently come down across a
bunch of wires up the street, and power had been out for over
a day since the power company has been going *nuts* trying to
fix the widespread damage from last night.
.
The person caretaking for the house wasn't sure what to do, and
there was no prognosis on when the power was going to be restored.
The owner had a "crazy idea" that if there were any charged UPSes
kicking around the house that weren't running computers [and thus
already long since discharged], they might be enough to power the
pump for a while. "Yeah, for about ten minutes, maybe" I said,
envisioning your typical sump pump with a fairly massive 120VAC
motor atop a pipe and float valve assembly. Not enough to pump
down the likely four or more inches of water that had already
accumulated, and this house does *not* have a small footprint.
.
In further discussion all he could remember about the pump was
a slightly odd mode of operation and the number "1800", but upon
plugging "sump pump" and "1800" into google, the first hit was the
Rule 1800 submersible marine/utility pump. "That's it!" he said,
and a little more link-chasing revealed that this little fella only
draws 100 watts when running. It doesn't have a float valve, it
simply tries pumping every 2 minutes or so and if it detects that
there is no water load, shuts down again. I realized that my big
ol' UPS, the one that can also plug into the car's 12V system, shown
at http://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/pix/prius-ferrups.jpg could
probably hold up that load. This UPS is only good for about 400
watts -- built for long runtime, not high power. It has 66 amp-
hours of 12V lead-acid goodness inside, as well as being able to
either be maintained off the Prius or *jump* the car if its aux
battery was down. So I coordinated with the caretaking person,
loaded up the UPS and a bunch of power hose, and tooled off into
the gathering night.
.
I backed the car up to the door and left it powered on, fired up the
UPS and went inside trailing a long AC cord with a CF-lamped clip
light plugged in as worklight in the basement. The water level was
more like six or eight inches by now especially over near where the
sump hole is, and was just about to kiss the bottom of the oil burner
motor on the boiler. Pulled the power cord over near the pump and
plugged it in; the pump gave a little kick and started up. We went
outside to check the outflow; it looked fairly anemic and didn't
seem promising to get the basement emptied in a reasonable timeframe
or even hold its own against any more water coming in through the
natural fieldstone foundation. But said friend had a couple of
larger pumps, model 2800 [which, in the meantime, we had found
indicates gallons per hour capacity] sitting around down there that
he hadn't adapted to the system yet. These only claim to pull 1.6
amps apiece, or about 200 watts. We fooled around with the hose
fittings and couldn't quite see how to connect things, but then
I realized that the right-angle output elbow comes completely off
leaving a stub that only needed a few wraps of tape to fit inside
the hose perfectly, totally leakproof after the clamp was tightened
down. So we fed the hose out the basement window and away from
the foundation, and I dropped this additional pump down into the
icky, oil-slicked swill and plugged it in, fully expecting it to
overload the UPS and for both pumps and my light to go off within
about 20 seconds. So I waited for that.
.
And waited.
.
And waited. And it didn't happen. The UPS was holding up the
whole schlemiel, and the car was in turn holding the UPS up and
simply running intermittently to keep the HV level just above the
usual two-pink-bars when you're sitting in Park for a long time.
And this new pump was *way* better than the first one. Pretty
impressive, actually, that either one of them could push a fairly
hefty volume of water up against eight feet of pressure on only
that much power. So now all we had to do was wait for the level
to drop, if it would. There was a visible difference about 20
minutes later, and in maybe another hour and a half [punctuated
by more phone calls and a food break], the water level was down
to the sump well and I could go around the foundation and try to
see where it was coming in and how badly. A little trickle down
the wall under where the water main comes in, and a small upwelling
over in another corner ... but nothing huge, and at this point we
were back to only the smaller pump which could hold its own against
that small continuing influx. It would run long enough to empty
the sump well, detect that it was sucking air and shut off, and
then come back on for another run about two minutes later.
.
But now the problem was how to maintain this state. It's not like I
really wanted to leave my car powered up in his driveway all night.
But after a little amp-hour math I realized that the UPS could
probably run that pump continuously on its own internal batteries
for six or seven hours, and at the 25 or 30% duty cycle it was now
running at to empty the sump well and shut down again that would
easily last overnight. [There's a reason this thing weighs about
100 pounds... it's full of lead and iron!] So I lugged the UPS out
of the car into his kitchen and left the pump plugged into it, and
headed home. Hopefully that will keep the water from rising.
The UPS is plugged into the wall, so if power comes back it will
simply feed through and continue powering the pump while recharging
the internal batteries.
.
On the way out I observed that the power guys were up the street
working on the downed tree, so power might actually be back tonight.
It's just started raining again, though, with another two days
of this crap predicted, so this might be, uh, interesting.
.
Regardless, there's probably a fairly nice bottle of single-malt
with my name on it now.
.
_H*

 

As I suspected, the power's back on this morning, but we're going to
leave the UPS in place for another day or so just in case. The heat
came back on without incident. We've warned the owner that everything
in the fridge is probably gonzo by now, but if that and minor
remaining sogginess in the basement is all they have to worry about
on return, then I guess we did the right thing. There isn't much
stored in the basement since it does tend to be wet anyways, and he's
had prior incidents which *did* require disassembly and drying-out of
the furnace parts. But not this time.
.
_H*