Air Conditioning Condensate: How to Drain

LESLIE: Gail in Ontario is on the line with a question about air conditioning condensate. How can we help you today?

GAIL: We just had a high-efficiency energy furnace and central air installed in our house. And I have a ranch-style house crawlspace. It’s all insulated. And they installed the furnace in the laundry room and they’ve got the air conditioning condensate pipe from the furnace and the central air dripping into a bucket into the ground of the crawlspace. And there’s limestone in the bucket. And we’re at odds whether this is a good thing or not.

TOM: So you say it’s dripping into a bucket. Is this a sump pump, like a sump pit? Or is this just a bucket on the ground in the crawlspace? I mean kind of describe it for me.

GAIL: Yeah, it’s just a bucket with limestone in it. They cut a hole in my plastic that’s running along the bottom of the crawlspace and they’ve got the bucket over the – where they cut it. And yeah, the pipe is just dripping into the bucket, going through the limestone and in the ground.

TOM: They’re basically just dumping the water under the – underneath the vapor barrier. No, I don’t think that’s a very good idea at all. It’s really sloppy. What you should be doing in this case is you should – or they should, more accurately, have installed a condensate pump.

Now, a condensate pump is a small pump. It sits near the furnace and near the air handler. And then the moisture goes into that pump. And once it fills up, a float starts the pump up and then pumps that condensate up through usually a clear plastic tube or a small pipe and then outside. So you basically run it outside your house the same way you might discharge your gutter. For example, in my house, I have a condensate pump that discharges into the same splash block as my gutter downspout and it takes that water outside.

I don’t like the idea at all of just dumping it into the crawlspace soil, which is essentially what they’re doing here.

GAIL: Yeah, I’ll tell them that. Yeah. Like I was – we were – it was really bothering us because we didn’t think it was a good thing, because I’m thinking all that water going under there? It’s defeating the purpose of insulating the crawlspace.

TOM: Yeah. No, your intuition is spot-on, OK? So you call that Ontario, Canada contractor back and get him to fix that, OK?

GAIL: And thank you so much for calling me.