Hello all,
I recently moved into a house where I have a sink in my basement which sits below the main pipe out to the sewer so I have a pump attached to the sink in order to push the water out. I have a ball valve for shutting off the line and a spring type check valve to prevent water from coming back up into the sink.
I have attached a crude diagram of the setup.
I'm running into a scenario where water travels back down the pipe and into the pump, which causes the pump to short cycle. I would think that the check valve (it is oriented correctly) should stop this from happening but it doesn't seem to be.
I thought the check valve might have been bad (it was positioned horizontally originally) so I replaced it and that seemed to work for a while but eventually the same thing started happening again. I was able to fix the issue temporarily by turning the pump off, filling the sink with water and then turning the pump on, letting it push all the water out but it only lasted for a couple weeks.
Leaving the pump off, water will end up coming back into the sink. Turning the ball valve seems to be the only way to keep water out for now.
I had a plumber look at it a while back but he said he wasn't sure what was happening and said that maybe there was some negative pressure in the stack that was causing the check valve to open up.
Any suggestions or ideas would be appreciated!
I recently moved into a house where I have a sink in my basement which sits below the main pipe out to the sewer so I have a pump attached to the sink in order to push the water out. I have a ball valve for shutting off the line and a spring type check valve to prevent water from coming back up into the sink.
I have attached a crude diagram of the setup.
I'm running into a scenario where water travels back down the pipe and into the pump, which causes the pump to short cycle. I would think that the check valve (it is oriented correctly) should stop this from happening but it doesn't seem to be.
I thought the check valve might have been bad (it was positioned horizontally originally) so I replaced it and that seemed to work for a while but eventually the same thing started happening again. I was able to fix the issue temporarily by turning the pump off, filling the sink with water and then turning the pump on, letting it push all the water out but it only lasted for a couple weeks.
Leaving the pump off, water will end up coming back into the sink. Turning the ball valve seems to be the only way to keep water out for now.
I had a plumber look at it a while back but he said he wasn't sure what was happening and said that maybe there was some negative pressure in the stack that was causing the check valve to open up.
Any suggestions or ideas would be appreciated!