Near Disaster In The Basement

You might recall that I spent a good part of Christmas Day bailing water out of my basement and waiting for the arrival of the plumber. He replaced the sump pump with a new one and I figured that after that, everything was all tickety-boo.

Oh no it's not!

Oh yes it is, I thought.

I was wrong.

This afternoon I walked down into my basement all fired up and ready to paint some more Minden Miniatures, when to my horror, I saw the dreaded dark stain of water on the carpet. Yes, water was seeping into the basement again. I hurried over to the side room where the furnace and sump pump are located, so that I could check on the pump. The furnace room was flooded with a couple inches of water, so I knew that the pump and the back up pump were not operating. I figured that it had to be the battery.

John the Plumber, who is becoming one of my best friends now, answered the emergency call. In fact, he was the same fellow who fixed things on Christmas Day. After a few minutes of tinkering around, he announced that the sump pump battery tender was out of juice, so it couldn't keep the main battery juiced up, which meant that the motors on the pumps weren't working. He gave me a replacement battery and said that it would probably run for only 4 hours. The store was closed so he couldn't get a replacement battery tender. So I went over to the Big Orange Box DIY Store and bought a 25 amp battery tender. Soon the sump pump was cooking like gas.

By midnight, things were pretty much under control. The pump was working, the water in the furnace room was going down, and water finally stopped seeping in under the walls. So I am crossing my fingers that things will continue to operate as expected and that I will not see any water on the floor when I wake up in the morning.

I didn't lose much to water damage. Most of my wargaming items are stored on shelves in another room in the basement. It received some water too, but most boxes were high off the floor. I had to throw out a lot of cardboard boxes that had been holding things such as unpainted castings, paint bottles and other impedimentia of wargaming. So nothing serious.

I'm off to bed now. The fans are running in the basement, and I will probably go back to the Big Orange Box DIY store and buy a dehumidifier and another fan so that I can dry out the basement.

Friday evening, I did manage to finish the second group of six Front Rank Austrians marching so that the Botta Regiment now has 60 figures. That will be the extent of my weekend painting as I will undoubtedly be working on the clean up phase of this disaster.