The basement of the Vassar College Chapel has a mighty drainage sump, a pair of pumps, and a mass of old-school cast-iron plumbing. I’m not certain, but I think the greenish pipe coming in from the rear is storm drainage from one side of the building.
Looks like they’ve got backup: two separate pumps and motors, with doubled plumbing on the ejection side.
On closer inspection, however, you’ll see that the near-side float switch rod coming up through the cover is broken and bent; that motor will never turn on.
One hopes this is deliberate, but the failed-off motor seems to be the newer / larger / less corroded of the two. We’ve had a lot of rain this summer, so I suppose if this was a problem, it would have already occurred.
It’s always a good idea to have all your sump pumps ready to run, should you be in a position to need sump pumps in the first place. Believe me, it’s much easier to fix things when you’re not hip-deep in rising water!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
2 responses to “They’re Not Redundant When One’s Broken”
Hey Ed, can you turn on full rss for the blog? The entries are great, but I’d love to have them in my rss reader.
There’s supposed to be a pair of RSS feed link thingies over in the right-hand column that I thought linked to the full feeds. What do they actually do for you?
I just dragged them near the top, under the Search box, but I don’t believe any of the results I get by looking at ’em with my RSS reader because I’ve done so much other fiddling.