I have a home built in 1960 with a daylight basement. The floor is about 2' below grade, maybe less. There is a basement door with a little stairwell (2 stairs) and at the base of the stairs, there is a drain. Very little water actually gets into the stairwell from rain as it is fairly protected. It appears to me that the drain is connected to a french drain, more or less, that extends into the backyard. The threshold is about 1" off the slab. The ground where I am has a small amount of decent soil, turns to clay about 8" down and to fairly solid stone about 18" down. We also live on a hill that drains away from the house. In times of heavy and prolonged rain, the water table rises faster than it can drain down the hill and it can't really sink deep into the ground. When this happens, water actually bubbles up from the drain, pools until it gets above the threshold and then comes in. We are planning on selling the house soon and I don't want to put a ton into fixing this and I don't want to break up the concrete to install a pump or anything like that. So far, the only idea I have had is to set a pump in the stairwell for those times. I know this may not be the best solution, so I am curious if anyone has a better solution that would still be fairly inexpensive and not a huge time commitment as I have little time left for this. Thank you!

System: Aquaklear AK500 Aeration, Drip Symptoms: Septic system backed up, air gurgling in first tank. Age of system: Installed with house, 2006 Users: 2 So we had the septic system pumped out 3 weeks ago. We had had very high levels of rain in Texas here and usually the system gets an alarm for a day or 2 after many days of rain. This time it had an alarm that stayed on so I called the pumper and got 3K worth of crap pumped. It had been 4 years since its last pumping so seemed prudent. His invoice noted large amounts of sludge in the final tank. I heard the gurgling tonight when I got done mowing. I went and checked the breaker panel and the guy had forgot to turn the alarm breaker back on :mad: after he pumped it. Not surprised. So I tripped it and its of course on. The pumps working, I checked the chlorine test valve tee outlet and its moving water through the system fine so I dont think the pumps clogged. I went back to the CCTV video of that day and saw some things that the guy messed with while there that surprised me. I guess I should have stayed outside and watched him the entire time. The system has a 4th access port, which houses a PVC ball valve connected to some of that pink pipe. Im not sure what this is or why he needed to mess with that, but he did. I went and checked it out and it seems to be spinning rather easily. What next? Could that Ball valve have something to do with it? Is there anything else I can check? He also left the chlorine test tee open when he left so clearly he was not paying any attention, he seemed hungover bad. I discovered that right off the bat as that was a very strange noise like a waterfall going inside the main tank of the system, I should have stayed outside the entire time and watched everything.