Hi All! Thank you for reading this post and helping us out. We recently moved into our house and though we love it, we hate the basement problems we'v been dealing with from day 1. To give a bit of history, ever since we moved in, we have had 7 inches of water 4 or 5 times in the basement in the 2 months of summer rains. The previous home owners mention they have never had water in the last 10yrs they'v lived in this house with a fully furnished basement. As of 2 weeks ago, we got a french perimeter drain system installed with 2 (1/2) horse power sump pumps. The other alternative we thought about was to get a check valve installed in the city's main drainage system outside our neighbor's house that was 2 blocks away from ours. After the installation, the system got tested when we had a heavy rain and the basement was bone dry as the perimeter drains were very effectively channeling water into the sump pit and throwing the water out. We felt everything was picture perfect. We decided that we should also install the check valve system which the city's guys broke during a routine drain cleanup process. Every since then, we have noticed a very steady stream of water being channeled into the sump pump pit, through one of the perimeter drains alongside 1 wall. And this happens during heavy rains, and during days and days of absolutely no rain. The sump pit is pretty deep and to give you an idea of the quantity of water, the sump pump will throw out water once every 20minutes, EVERYDAY for the last few days since the check valve was installed. Prior to that, there was NO steady stream of water entering the pits at all. We are concerned because A) where is this water coming from B) could the check valve installation have broken something causing water to continuously flow into the drainage pipes alongside that 1 particular wall, C) We do not have a battery backup and D) our pumps life will be shortened if they have to work constantly. We are working on getting a battery backup but we really urgently need to understand where the water is coming from. I am so sorry for this lengthy post but any help would be highly appreciated at this point. Thank you so so much in advance!

Hi all, I have a question that I'm hoping someone could help me out with. I received a letter from my water board and a CD containing a video that my sewer lateral is cracked in two places. In the front yard I have a trap about 10 feet from the street public hook up. They stated that my crack is about 1 foot from the trap towards the house and another small crack at about 8 feet from the trap to the house. The first crack at 1 foot is letting in a good amount of ground water according to the video. Like, someone has a faucet turned on. The pipe is 10 feet deep in our yard. Funny thing is about 10 years ago, the entire development was ripped up and new sewer lines were laid and tied into the houses. I bought the house 5 years ago so this was before me. Our house is 40 years old and the pipe is cast iron. One thing I noticed since talking to plumbers trying to get an estimate to get this pipe fixed. One plumber said " Look how bad your yard settled next to the street". I didn't even think about this. After talking with him, I said could that possibly have caused enough pressure to cause my pipe to crack back at the trap? The ground is settling at the trap too. It looks like where the sewer line connects to my house an entire line settling up into my yard. I attached some pics but might be hard to see. The one pic you can actually see the curb area and I've been throwing soil in the sunken hole from time to time. You could actually see under the curb to the street that's how sunken it was.. It appears my trap is no longer straight vertically either, it seems to have pitches to one side so it's not even. Could when they did the sewer tie in's and new pipes 10 years ago eventually caused this issue? The plumber looked at my video and said in the 20 years of business he's never seen a sewer lateral as clean and solid as mine? This leads me to believe it was damaged. Any thoughts? I will try to take better ground type photos later if I can. Any ideas? What's my next step? My first estimate just to dig the 8 foot long trench and replace the damaged pipe is $4,000 without permits. I have a 35 year old Oak tree right next to the pipe which I fear I'm going to loose due to root cutting and such, not to mention ground weakening around the root structure. Thanks for any info or suggestions you can provide. Spank. [URL=http://s3.photobucket.com/user/spankeyt1473/media/photo2_zpsf3d8fbc0.jpg.html][IMG]http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y87/spankeyt1473/photo2_zpsf3d8fbc0.jpg[/IMG][/URL] [URL=http://s3.photobucket.com/user/spankeyt1473/media/photo1_zps58f6c6e6.jpg.html][IMG]http://i3.photobucket.com/albums/y87/spankeyt1473/photo1_zps58f6c6e6.jpg[/IMG][/URL]