Freezing Discharge Lines

If you have a good water preventive system in your home, your sump pump gets the water out of your Crawlspace and away from your house with a pipe – usually plastic and about 1 ½ inches in diameter. This pipe runs on the surface of the ground, or in a shallow buried trench, and discharges the water onto the surface away from the home.

In the winter, however, the pipe outlet becomes blocked with snow and ice. So now, when the pump runs and that water fills to the pipe, it can’t escape out. So what ends up happening, is every time the pump works it fills up that pipe more and more until it backfills into the sump and into your Crawlspace which you had wanted to avoid in the first place.

There is however a solution. Basement Systems created and Ice Guard system. This is a specially engineered fitting that goes outside your home and automatically ejects the water away from the exterior wall in the event that the pipe freezes. It is designed with holes to allow this to happen, yet no water gets out of these openings when the pipe is unfrozen.