Ed Oscuro
06-05-2008, 04:41 PM
[[ Up-front disclaimer: By no means is this a definitive guide; if you have some good suggestions please make 'em known! A lot of what's in here should be agreeable to professionals; I try to say nothing that I haven't heard from a pro. All the same, it's not advice I consider myself qualified to give just offhand, which is why I'm quoting various sources - for your own sake, get a second opinion (or a third, or a fourth, or a fifth, depending on what your contractors are telling you that might possibly be self-serving bunk). On the topic of wells, this page (http://www.yourwaterwellandpump.com/FAQs.cfm) corresponds with what I've heard about many aspects of well tanks. ]]
Well, the truth is that there's nothing particularly safe about storing your crap in a basement. Flood? Your stuff is probably gone. Fire? All the water being sprayed on your house has to go somewhere. And then there's mold and whatnot.
The basement is the traditional dumping place for the average American household's crap, but it also usually holds potentially dangerous pieces of equipment: The furnace, the water pump (if you have a well), the fuse box/breaker box, and possibly gas lines.
I'm focusing on safety with water here due to a recent almost-incident here, although I'll take a moment to deal with furnaces and other systems too.
OTHER SYSTEMS:
Fuse box/Breaker box: The door should always be closed when you're not flipping switches. I'm told that you'd be denied insurance in the case of a fire in the breaker box when the door was found to be left open.
Furnace: Don't store any paper or cardboard boxes within six feet of this (at the moment I'm violating this rule, actually!) for obvious reasons. On a humorous side note, if you're in your basement and think you're smelling burned rubber from inside the furnace, it's possible that a skunk sprayed near the furnace intake. In this case, turn the furnace off and check both inside and outside.
Water heater: As seen on Mythbusters, they can EXPLODE! Follow their suggestion and don't cap the relief valve - if it's leaking put a bucket underneath it and call the plumber.
WATER STUFF:
YOUR WELL AND HIS FRIEND THE TANK
If you're on city water, ideally you should find out how to shut the water off before it gets into your house. If that's not possible (and I suppose it won't be), find out the earliest shutoff point so some old pipe failing won't hurt you.
No matter what water you're on - well or city - you should take a moment if you've got an old house and see what sort of piping you have in the house. Old copper piping can fracture, especially if it's set into a concrete wall without room to move back and forth. Steel pipe - eh, not so great - lead pipes - uh oh. Lead pipes lead you to do things like this (http://www.sealedgameheaven.com/)! (Sorry, cheap dig.)
Having your own well is common (and often recommended) in the suburbs.
Bear with me; I know this section is long but it'll pay off in the end for your collecting concerns.
Let's organize things in chronological order, asking the questions you'll need to ask from building your house to the springing of a leak (so that we can see where along the way we can prevent this from happening).
As the house is being built, you have some people come out to dig a well. Most likely your contractor will select these people, and naturally cost will be their major consideration. A well is a well, right?
Drilling a Well
Q: Cable tool or well rig?
Cable tool operators don't have the money (or the desire to outlay the capital required) for a proper well rig, and I've been told this limits what sort of pipe they can put into the ground.
Well rig operators drive in a huge truck that will crush your tidy little concrete pad (good reason to go with gravel) that has the same operating principle as the oil industry uses - it has a rotating bit on the end that'll crush stones and whatever else is on the ground into gravel.
Q: Black iron pipe, or galvanized, or PVC?
I've organized those in terms of worst to best. This choice is only possible if your well driller has the better (expensive) machinery, because cable tool can only drive in a metal pipe (and if you've got a lot of rocks down there, guess what's happening to that pipe).
The bottom line here is that PVC doesn't give off material to ionic reactions, normally won't break, and that's it. Galvanized pipe protects the iron underneath by sacrificing the zinc covering if necessary (zinc is relatively corrosion resistant as well), although it's still a long ways behind PVC. Black iron pipe (or steel, I suppose) is terrible, don't let them put this in as your well.
Besides the release of ions, that metal pipe also can corrode the pump fast to it so it can't be removed during maintenance. With PVC that pump will simply slide out.
The only downside to PVC is that the exposed well head will break off if you ram it with your truck; but if you hit that iron well cap with your truck, both the truck AND the well would be out of commission. Snapped-off PVC pipe well heads are relatively easy to fix, even in the middle of the winter.
The Tank
The other major consideration you can influence is the style of pump.
When the tank's low, it starts the pump up. Crap tanks such as the short green ones sold at various help-yourself places are not the way to go. The tank should have a hard (not rubbery) valve nipple on top; rubber ones (such as the green tank) will lose their pressure and make your well's pump work more often than it should.
Flood prevention!
I'll just quickly mention the sump pump and floor drain. If the water table is far below your house they shouldn't be necessary, but they may be worth the peace of mind...you can buy a lot of stuff for the price of a sump pump and installing a drain in a concrete basement, but it'll protect what you have. There's a simpler fix to a leak in the house though, and it'll stop any well-caused flooding in your house.
The system we've described normally works nicely enough, pumping water to your tank and from there to the rest of the house as it's needed.
But sometimes something happens! In my case, there was a leak out at the well, and the water being pumped out there - many meters away from the point where the well's hose enters the house - finally started seeping in through the hole in the concrete wall where the hose enters. We managed to prevent a flood.
A worse case would have been a break in the pipes somewhere inside the house.
In either case, the tank inside the house - which controls the pump - is only "aware" that the water level inside it is dropping and so it keeps the pump outside working. Depending on the pump type, you may be getting 18 gallons every minute on the floor of your house.
Thankfully, there is a simple fix:
Locate the power switch for your well pump.
When going out of the house for a day, hit the switch. If there's a leak in the house, all you get is what's inside the tank - enough to make you grimace and run a few buckets of water outside, but that's all.
If you're going to store stuff in your basement anyway
Snap-top plastic bins have been promoted by other users here in the past. There's a chance they'll float, so long as there isn't anything too heavy inside. A waterproof bin would be ideal; zip-lock style plastic bags for stuff inside would be great too.
If you must use cardboard boxes, try to keep them off the floor; if you can't do that, put cardboard boxes with the cheapest or most plastic stuff under the boxes that have anything paper, cardboard, or otherwise prone to fouling inside them. I'd rather put a bundle of game controllers in water and dirt before I'd put a NES Zapper in there; I'd rather have an NES system underwater before the cartridges.
Well, the truth is that there's nothing particularly safe about storing your crap in a basement. Flood? Your stuff is probably gone. Fire? All the water being sprayed on your house has to go somewhere. And then there's mold and whatnot.
The basement is the traditional dumping place for the average American household's crap, but it also usually holds potentially dangerous pieces of equipment: The furnace, the water pump (if you have a well), the fuse box/breaker box, and possibly gas lines.
I'm focusing on safety with water here due to a recent almost-incident here, although I'll take a moment to deal with furnaces and other systems too.
OTHER SYSTEMS:
Fuse box/Breaker box: The door should always be closed when you're not flipping switches. I'm told that you'd be denied insurance in the case of a fire in the breaker box when the door was found to be left open.
Furnace: Don't store any paper or cardboard boxes within six feet of this (at the moment I'm violating this rule, actually!) for obvious reasons. On a humorous side note, if you're in your basement and think you're smelling burned rubber from inside the furnace, it's possible that a skunk sprayed near the furnace intake. In this case, turn the furnace off and check both inside and outside.
Water heater: As seen on Mythbusters, they can EXPLODE! Follow their suggestion and don't cap the relief valve - if it's leaking put a bucket underneath it and call the plumber.
WATER STUFF:
YOUR WELL AND HIS FRIEND THE TANK
If you're on city water, ideally you should find out how to shut the water off before it gets into your house. If that's not possible (and I suppose it won't be), find out the earliest shutoff point so some old pipe failing won't hurt you.
No matter what water you're on - well or city - you should take a moment if you've got an old house and see what sort of piping you have in the house. Old copper piping can fracture, especially if it's set into a concrete wall without room to move back and forth. Steel pipe - eh, not so great - lead pipes - uh oh. Lead pipes lead you to do things like this (http://www.sealedgameheaven.com/)! (Sorry, cheap dig.)
Having your own well is common (and often recommended) in the suburbs.
Bear with me; I know this section is long but it'll pay off in the end for your collecting concerns.
Let's organize things in chronological order, asking the questions you'll need to ask from building your house to the springing of a leak (so that we can see where along the way we can prevent this from happening).
As the house is being built, you have some people come out to dig a well. Most likely your contractor will select these people, and naturally cost will be their major consideration. A well is a well, right?
Drilling a Well
Q: Cable tool or well rig?
Cable tool operators don't have the money (or the desire to outlay the capital required) for a proper well rig, and I've been told this limits what sort of pipe they can put into the ground.
Well rig operators drive in a huge truck that will crush your tidy little concrete pad (good reason to go with gravel) that has the same operating principle as the oil industry uses - it has a rotating bit on the end that'll crush stones and whatever else is on the ground into gravel.
Q: Black iron pipe, or galvanized, or PVC?
I've organized those in terms of worst to best. This choice is only possible if your well driller has the better (expensive) machinery, because cable tool can only drive in a metal pipe (and if you've got a lot of rocks down there, guess what's happening to that pipe).
The bottom line here is that PVC doesn't give off material to ionic reactions, normally won't break, and that's it. Galvanized pipe protects the iron underneath by sacrificing the zinc covering if necessary (zinc is relatively corrosion resistant as well), although it's still a long ways behind PVC. Black iron pipe (or steel, I suppose) is terrible, don't let them put this in as your well.
Besides the release of ions, that metal pipe also can corrode the pump fast to it so it can't be removed during maintenance. With PVC that pump will simply slide out.
The only downside to PVC is that the exposed well head will break off if you ram it with your truck; but if you hit that iron well cap with your truck, both the truck AND the well would be out of commission. Snapped-off PVC pipe well heads are relatively easy to fix, even in the middle of the winter.
The Tank
The other major consideration you can influence is the style of pump.
When the tank's low, it starts the pump up. Crap tanks such as the short green ones sold at various help-yourself places are not the way to go. The tank should have a hard (not rubbery) valve nipple on top; rubber ones (such as the green tank) will lose their pressure and make your well's pump work more often than it should.
Flood prevention!
I'll just quickly mention the sump pump and floor drain. If the water table is far below your house they shouldn't be necessary, but they may be worth the peace of mind...you can buy a lot of stuff for the price of a sump pump and installing a drain in a concrete basement, but it'll protect what you have. There's a simpler fix to a leak in the house though, and it'll stop any well-caused flooding in your house.
The system we've described normally works nicely enough, pumping water to your tank and from there to the rest of the house as it's needed.
But sometimes something happens! In my case, there was a leak out at the well, and the water being pumped out there - many meters away from the point where the well's hose enters the house - finally started seeping in through the hole in the concrete wall where the hose enters. We managed to prevent a flood.
A worse case would have been a break in the pipes somewhere inside the house.
In either case, the tank inside the house - which controls the pump - is only "aware" that the water level inside it is dropping and so it keeps the pump outside working. Depending on the pump type, you may be getting 18 gallons every minute on the floor of your house.
Thankfully, there is a simple fix:
Locate the power switch for your well pump.
When going out of the house for a day, hit the switch. If there's a leak in the house, all you get is what's inside the tank - enough to make you grimace and run a few buckets of water outside, but that's all.
If you're going to store stuff in your basement anyway
Snap-top plastic bins have been promoted by other users here in the past. There's a chance they'll float, so long as there isn't anything too heavy inside. A waterproof bin would be ideal; zip-lock style plastic bags for stuff inside would be great too.
If you must use cardboard boxes, try to keep them off the floor; if you can't do that, put cardboard boxes with the cheapest or most plastic stuff under the boxes that have anything paper, cardboard, or otherwise prone to fouling inside them. I'd rather put a bundle of game controllers in water and dirt before I'd put a NES Zapper in there; I'd rather have an NES system underwater before the cartridges.