Peace of Mind

Not the prettiest of pictures to grace my journal, but nevertheless I’m very happy to have this particular bit of kit. It was installed exactly one year ago, after we had suffered repeated floodings in our cellar. Instead of having the entire cracked cellar slab dug out and replaced, which would have been prohibitively expensive, we had pumps installed which automatically sense any ingress of water and pump it out into an external drain. It wasn’t exactly a cheap option, though, and we had a couple of weeks of huge disruption in the house while it was done, but we are very grateful for the peace of mind it’s given us.

Today the engineer came to service the pumps – those are the circular things you can see at the front. One acts as the primary pump and the other as the backup pump. When he does the annual service, the engineer swaps the primary and secondary pumps so they get an even amount of use. I didn't see the pumps when they were installed, so I made sure I went down and took a photo today while the cover was off!

As an added bonus, there’s also a special backup battery down in the cellar so that the pumps will work even in the event of a power failure.