I guess it's been 2 weeks ago that I installed a secondary sump pump with a battery backup. For those who don't know what that means, if you have a room below grade/ground, it likely has a sump pump. Builders dig a pit, put in an electric pump, and a pipe out of the house for the pump to send the water out when the water level raises and triggers it. Problem is, like any motor, one day it will pump it's last. If that happens, and you're getting a lot of rain, you won't know until you have water gushing into your basement. Same can happen if your power is out long enough for the sump pit to overflow. So a backup pump is a second pump placed a little higher which would only pump if the first (lower) pump fails to. Put the second pump on a battery and you have redundancy and peace of mind for not only a power failure, but a primary pump failure.
So I did that. In addition, I purchased this smart outlet called Pump Spy. It's one of those things with one plug(3 prongs) and two outlets to plug things into. Nothing special about that. But this one you link to your wifi. And you download the pump spy app. I'm sitting here at one house, and I get a text just a few minutes ago that the sump pump has lost power. We are in the middle of a really hard thunderstorm, but my house power is on. I text one of my tenants at that house and he confirms the power is out. HOW COOL IS THAT??!! When the house loses power, we lose wifi too! Yet I still got the text from that outlet. So awesome! So now, the backup pump should be using the battery to pump water out. (I tested this scenario when I installed it by killing power and dumping buckets of water in)
Anyway just wanted to share. Remembering that one time that basement flooded when the pump had died. : |