Hi all, so our sump pump have been running probably every 30-60 minutes pumping out water in the basement for years. A weird thing happened this summer. We were on vacation and the sump pump broke and when we got back there were about 1-2 feet of water flooding our basement. After that incident the sump pump hasn't been working meaning it doesn't need to pump out water any more. When we had an outage we had to hook up the sump pump to a generator but yesterday the outage lasted a whole day with pouring rain and there was no need to hook it up. I am thinking we can even get rid of the sump pump all together which of course we wont! Has anybody experienced something similar, or if you know what has happened? If anybody can diagnose this, this can probably help many people who are having wet basement problems. The water level doesn't rise where the sump pump is now it is very low and thinking of all that electric bill we were spending on the pump constantly pumping out water and 1 flood fixed it all? Winter is coming and this will be the first winter since the basement got fixed? (broken?) and it becomes below temperature here so maybe it will start pumping after that but as of now our basement is very dry. Does anybody have any idea why this occurred?

I've been working on reinsulating the attic of our 100 year old house lately. This is a very well built old place, though it is apparently balloon frame. We have a live-in attic on the third floor with large (30ft long, roughly 5ft tall) knee wall space on one side and two moderately sized ones on the other. Since its such an old house, I'm sure ventilation lacking but the insulation is already quite bad so ventilation will have to be dealt with later to avoid making the living area unlivable through the winter. I live in central PA on the NY border, so we get very cold winters and hot-ish summers. I had a couple samples of insulation tested for asbestos before diving into this project, and the tests (from a local environmental testing company) came back negative. The insulation in most of the house is 95% mineral wool, 5% something else (not asbestos). What I keep finding in small deposits and lightly dusted all over certain surfaces is this stuff. Take a look at the attached pictures. What are these things? They're super tiny. You can see the head of a nail for comparison in one of the pictures. It almost looks like shiny gold dust from more than a couple feet away, but they are heavy or dense enough to not blow around too much. I thought maybe it was sap, as there are some that aren't perfectly around, but there aren't any drips on the rafters like I've seen in other pictures. The color varies, some are gold, some black, some clear or silver. I just find this stuff disbursed throughout the attic, often accumulated in the corners of boards or other places where it has likely settled or fallen over time. We had our roof redone last year and electric wiring updated the year prior, so I'm wondering if maybe it IS sap but it was disturbed by all the work on the house, or that maybe it fell off decades ago and has just been rolling around in beads here ever since. I doubt its harmful, but I am curious. Enlighten me! :)