jakeg
New Member
I bought a house in the fall with some obnoxious issues regarding the basement half-bath (sink + toilet). When we moved in we were dealing with a sewage smell coming from the toilet. Low-and-behold, we had a plumber in who explained who showed me the AAV sitting on top of the vent pipe for the ejector pit. I was told this was a no-no, and that we needed to run a vent pipe out of the side of the house. Shortly later, we started to get water around the bowl of the toilet. Turns out that the wax seal on the toilet was bad. Plumber replaced and installed the new vent pipe. Which was all great until my toilet stopped flushing - water backing up in the bowl. Not all the time, just seemingly when the ejector pit was getting full (after 6/7 flushes). Plumber had nothing but guesses without me paying even more money to diagnose, and given COVID and tight schedules, I figured I would try to do at least the diagnostic myself.
So here's what I know now. First and foremost, someone really botched this installation. The toilet is standing on an Everbilt Sistema Upflush System basin, which is installed under the floor and seemingly secured in place with concrete. That's right. Even though it seems like the primary advantage of this kind of system is that you don't need to put a hole though concrete, they decided to put this one under the floor. From an aesthetic perspective, I get it, but from a practical perspective... I'm less-than-enthused.
The sink has an S-bend (yikes) in the cabinet, and then goes directly into the concrete floor without a vent. Presumably it connects to some part of the upflush basin, but it definitely doesn't connect where it should (the larger area containing the pump), so they must have cut it into the smaller part that the toilet sits on. I'm not sure what the ramifications of this are, but when the toilet flushes, it often drains the sink trap, so... there's that.
OK, onto the pump itself. When I took the access lid of the basin off (approx 20 bolts, some barely accessibly under a 2x4... gr...), I located and inspected the float. It is a run-of-the-mill piggyback float switch. Could be original that came with the pump, or could be a replacement, but it is in working-condition. And the pump itself is working fine too. The problem seems to stem from the level of the float switch itself. The pump doesn't trigger until something like 16" of water height from the floor of the basin. But the height of the toilet part of the basin is only something like 4". So eventually the toilet just can't compete, and there's absolutely no airflow. I was struck at how terrible of a system Everbilt had made, until I realized the awful truth that the pump being used isn't designed for the basin. It is a totally different pump. As you can see in the picture above, the pump that comes with the upflush system has a small vertical float switch that is pretty close to the floor of the basin, and it's not a piggyback.
This set me on a frenzied Google search of where I could get the right pump, only to realize that pretty much all pumps are made for a cylindrical pit where the sewage is coming in well above the bottom of the basin. None of the pumps or floats even come close to matching the specs required by the Everbilt system (something like 2.5" off-position, 4" on-position). The smallest I could find was 5" on and 10" off. I even tried to gerry-rig the float switch to be lower on the existing pump, but because of the height of the pump, the lowest water level after pumping stops is still too high for the basin, and so the float doesn't actually hit the off-position and runs forever.
So I'm left with a few options and I frankly hate them all, but I'm hoping that y'all can help me figure this out. The first is to simply re-purchase the whole upflush system and re-install just the pump into my existing basin (I don't think they sell the pump standalone). This would put my out at least $700, but I would have the peace-of-mind in knowing that I'm using the correct pump. I would still need to figure out the sink situation, but I'm hoping that a dedicated vent could go a long way (is an AAV a terrible option there?).
The second option would be to invest now in a different system. I don't love the fact that I'm locked into this Everbilt monolith and can't replace individual parts if/when they fail. I'm wondering if I could do a lot more good long-term by getting a macerating toilet, plumbing the sink into that and then hooking into my existing waste/vent pipes. This would be more of an expense, a much larger project (my first plumbing project), and probably involve some amount of drywall repair, but we already have some of patching to do from the new vent run, so why not? And if I go this route, what do I do with the existing ejector pit? Seal it off somehow and pray it doesn't come back to haunt me? It's not like I can just lift it out...
I don't know. Any advice would be awesome.
So here's what I know now. First and foremost, someone really botched this installation. The toilet is standing on an Everbilt Sistema Upflush System basin, which is installed under the floor and seemingly secured in place with concrete. That's right. Even though it seems like the primary advantage of this kind of system is that you don't need to put a hole though concrete, they decided to put this one under the floor. From an aesthetic perspective, I get it, but from a practical perspective... I'm less-than-enthused.
The sink has an S-bend (yikes) in the cabinet, and then goes directly into the concrete floor without a vent. Presumably it connects to some part of the upflush basin, but it definitely doesn't connect where it should (the larger area containing the pump), so they must have cut it into the smaller part that the toilet sits on. I'm not sure what the ramifications of this are, but when the toilet flushes, it often drains the sink trap, so... there's that.
OK, onto the pump itself. When I took the access lid of the basin off (approx 20 bolts, some barely accessibly under a 2x4... gr...), I located and inspected the float. It is a run-of-the-mill piggyback float switch. Could be original that came with the pump, or could be a replacement, but it is in working-condition. And the pump itself is working fine too. The problem seems to stem from the level of the float switch itself. The pump doesn't trigger until something like 16" of water height from the floor of the basin. But the height of the toilet part of the basin is only something like 4". So eventually the toilet just can't compete, and there's absolutely no airflow. I was struck at how terrible of a system Everbilt had made, until I realized the awful truth that the pump being used isn't designed for the basin. It is a totally different pump. As you can see in the picture above, the pump that comes with the upflush system has a small vertical float switch that is pretty close to the floor of the basin, and it's not a piggyback.
This set me on a frenzied Google search of where I could get the right pump, only to realize that pretty much all pumps are made for a cylindrical pit where the sewage is coming in well above the bottom of the basin. None of the pumps or floats even come close to matching the specs required by the Everbilt system (something like 2.5" off-position, 4" on-position). The smallest I could find was 5" on and 10" off. I even tried to gerry-rig the float switch to be lower on the existing pump, but because of the height of the pump, the lowest water level after pumping stops is still too high for the basin, and so the float doesn't actually hit the off-position and runs forever.
So I'm left with a few options and I frankly hate them all, but I'm hoping that y'all can help me figure this out. The first is to simply re-purchase the whole upflush system and re-install just the pump into my existing basin (I don't think they sell the pump standalone). This would put my out at least $700, but I would have the peace-of-mind in knowing that I'm using the correct pump. I would still need to figure out the sink situation, but I'm hoping that a dedicated vent could go a long way (is an AAV a terrible option there?).
The second option would be to invest now in a different system. I don't love the fact that I'm locked into this Everbilt monolith and can't replace individual parts if/when they fail. I'm wondering if I could do a lot more good long-term by getting a macerating toilet, plumbing the sink into that and then hooking into my existing waste/vent pipes. This would be more of an expense, a much larger project (my first plumbing project), and probably involve some amount of drywall repair, but we already have some of patching to do from the new vent run, so why not? And if I go this route, what do I do with the existing ejector pit? Seal it off somehow and pray it doesn't come back to haunt me? It's not like I can just lift it out...
I don't know. Any advice would be awesome.
