The Sump Pump Stump

On Friday morning, Debbie and I awoke to an ear piercing alarm type sound in our house. Although Debbie was sure that the house was going to explode any second, I recognized fairly quickly that it was not a fire alarm. Fire alarms have a pulsing sound and the noise we were being blasted with was a steady noise like never ending nails on a chalkboard. Debbie was not convinced however and was sure that something catastrophic was about to happen.

It was not very hard to follow the sound down to the utility room in our basement. However, the noise was so excruciatingly loud, you really could not stay in the utility room for more than a few seconds. Also, for the few seconds that you could stay in the room, there really was no way of identifying a source of the noise because it seemed like it was coming from everywhere. I went in search of my ear plugs but I could not find them so I attempted to stuff toilet paper in my ears so that I might be able to tolerate the noise long enough to figure out where it was coming from.

Much to my dismay, I could not find anything in the utility room that could possibly be making that amazing noise. There were no smoke or carbon monoxide detectors in the room and I could not imagine that the hot water heater or the furnace could be making that sort of sound. None-the-less, I killed the power to the house and turned off the gas to see if the noise was driven by gas or electricity. It wasn't. Even with no power and no gas, the unimaginable noise continued. At that point, I knew the noise was battery powered but I still had no idea where it could be coming from. I then proceeded to call everybody I could think of that might possibly have a guess as to what might be causing the noise. Debbie decided that it would be best to call the gas company just for reassurance that we were not about to explode.

After about an hour of torturous pain and suffering, we basically decided that we were just going to abandon the house. A few minutes prior, I had spoken with the Landlord's contractor who said he would come over that evening to see if he could figure it out. We decided to get out of the house for the day and let someone else try to figure it out because it appeared as though I was incapable.

Just as I was about to leave to take Savana to school and head to my office, I decided to give it one more try and wouldn't you know it, I found the source of the noise. I have a mental list of great moments in my life and finding the source of that dang noise is now on that list. The neighborhood that we live in has a pretty high water table so many of the homes have sump pumps in the basement to pump out the water before it comes into the basement. That pump is in the utility room buried in the floor with a lid on the top of it. Poking out of the lid is a small plastic cylinder, which is about the size of a stack of 15 CDs. There was a little hole in the lid of the cylinder and when I put my finger on it, shazam, the noise was muffled. At that point I was able to take the lid off the cylinder and remove the battery. The object making the noise was a little larger than a quarter and about a 1/2 inch in thickness. I truly cannot believe that something that small can make a noise that terrible. The alarm was lucky I did not have a hammer sitting right there.

Anyway, for those of you wondering, the alarm was letting us know that the water was 5 inches from the top of the tank that holds the pump. The pump does not seem to be working and needs to be fixed.

Moral of the story -- If you ever find yourself wanting to commit suicide because you can't figure out where a particularly terrible sound is coming from, don't forget to check the alarm on the sump pump.