Dry Out a Wet Basement

LESLIE: Denny in New Jersey is dealing with water in the basement. Tell us about the problem.

DENNY: Every time that it leaks, every time that it rains, water is going to come inside.

LESLIE: OK.

DENNY: I’m thinking to put a sump pump in there but I don’t know if that’s going to help or not.

LESLIE: Well, I think that that’s going to be overkill; I mean, especially you’re mentioning that you’re only seeing the water in the basement when it rains, which is consistent with a drainage situation. You’re probably dealing with too much water that gets around the foundation perimeter of your home during these rainstorms.

So what you want to do to address it, and get that water away from the foundation where it’s not going to come into the basement, is you want to look at your gutter system. You want to make sure that you’ve got enough gutters on the house and that they’re clean and the downspouts are free-flowing and then you want to look at where the downspouts deposit the water. You want to make sure that they’re not sort of just stopping against your foundation wall and all that water is just sort of collecting there. You want those downspouts to extend away from the house four feet – whatever you can do, get them underground, bury them, move that water out just so you’re getting the water away and you want to look at the grading around the perimeter of your foundation as well. You don’t want that soil sloping towards the house. You want it sort of gradually rolling away from the house so that it’s moving all of that water away and if you can do that, you’ll keep that water from coming in during a rainstorm. I think a sump pump is going to be overkill.

DENNY: OK. Thank you very much.