We Don't Just Swap Pumps — We Fix the System
A few years back, we got called out to a finished basement in East Palo Alto that had flooded for the third time in five years. The homeowner was furious — not at us, we'd never been there before, but at the cycle she was stuck in. Every time it flooded, a different company came out, replaced the pump, and left. A year or two later, water again.
When we lifted the pit lid, the problem was obvious to anyone who'd actually worked on a few hundred of these. The pit was undersized for the inflow rate her basement was seeing. The discharge line ran maybe four feet from the foundation before dumping into the yard, so half of what got pumped out was finding its way right back to the same pit through the soil. The check valve had been installed at the wrong elevation, so every time the pump cycled off, water in the discharge line drained back into the pit and tripped the pump again — which is why she'd been replacing motors so often. The pump itself was always undersized, in part because the contractors kept matching what was there instead of sizing for what was actually needed.
We replaced the pit with a properly sized one. Ran a new discharge line out to a drainage point twelve feet from the foundation. Set the check valve at the right elevation. Installed a primary pump sized to the inflow rate, with a battery backup wired to a dedicated alarm. That basement hasn't flooded since.
The point of the story isn't that we're heroes. The point is that sump pump work fails for reasons that have nothing to do with the pump itself, and the only way to stop the cycle is to install the system as a system — not as a single component swap. At CNR Plumbing Services, that's how we approach every sump pump job in East Palo Alto.