I will start by saying I’m not that kind of engineer and you shouldn’t take anything here as advice. It’s a comical re-telling of my mishaps and probably not even to building code.

Okay, so the new pump/hose situation was not working. The drinking water system backwash would flood the basement (slightly) mostly because the pump we fixed simply wasn’t getting output anymore.

It was working when we initially installed it and we did test it outside just pumping from a bucket at it was outputting a good rate!

I went away for work for about a week and my partner had been dealing with this so I decided to just follow his lead and see what he wanted to try, but also get what I thought we needed (which was to go back to using some hard pipe and not have such a long, slack hose).

His suggestion was to rent drain cleaner. We went to the local big box store and it turns out that you can’t really rent tools > 25’ for 1.25" pipes. They had a hand-held tool to rent but it cost the same to rent for 24 hours as it would to buy one, so we just did that. We ended up buying a 25’ drain auger that could be operated by hand or drill for about $35.

When we got home, we tried disconnected the piping and tried to get the tool into the 90 at the wall, which you will remember didn’t look so bad…

Turns out the other side was a lot worse and really did explain why the pump just wasn’t pumping:

A centrifugal pump can pump against a closed valve without blowing up the piping because the flow is dependent on the discharge pressure, or head. The pump will just keep moving less and less fluid as the discharge head increases. When you have a restriction in the pipe like this, you will notice the pump is running but the level is not dropping. There are other potential causes (the impeller is gone, for example) that will show the same symptoms, so it was good to see that restriction right away.

I took the elbow outside to wash off and use a screw driver to chip away at the build up. That stuff is solid! While I did that, my partner augured the line out of the house. Some gunk came back, but not really that much. It looks like the line isn’t as bad as just that fitting.

I have a theory that the rapid change in direction is slowing down the flow so it’s not scouring as well, but we decided to not try and mess with any of the piping today. When I install the new piping, I will get rid of the 90 degree elbow.

When re-instating the pumps we did find that we were air locked and the pump would not pump at all. We were able to fix that by opening the flex coupling a bit to let the pressure escape. We were going to prime it, but decided to just give it a go once the pressure released and it ended up working just fine then. With the check valve, we shouldn’t have to do that again as the line will always be full. There is a little hole on the threading for the check valve, but I suspect that’s plugged.

Right now, the pump is working much better so we’ll take that as a win and a reminder of what we should check if the rate drops off again.