Keep Your Sump Pump Working & Avoid a Flooded Basement

With near-record precipitation and flash flooding in Toronto this week, many people experienced flooded basements and water damage. The city of Toronto, Ontario, where CarGenerator is headquartered, has an abundance of ‘century homes,’ typically two or three-story, detached, double brick homes, built between 1900 and 1950. Originally these homes had three or four bedrooms, lathe and plaster walls, knob and tube wiring, and little-to-no insulation. Another typical feature of a Toronto century home, like others in older cities around North America, is a fairly shallow foundation, with full basements of less than 6 feet in height. With ever increasing demand for real estate, many century home owners have underpinned their foundations and dug out these old basements to turn them into additional living space. One of the unfortunate side effects of this type of renovation, however, is bringing the foundation floor lower in relation to the water table. To manage this problem, it’s not uncommon for homeowners to install a sump pump, that collects water from weeping tiles around the foundation, and pumps it into the municipal storm drain system. Whenever there is a massive rain, it’s a good time to think about your basement, and ensure that if you are relying on a sump pump to keep your basement dry, that your sump pump keeps working in the event of a power outage. CarGenerator can help. Dan Larson is a CarGenerator customer we profiled in the winter, whose Toronto century home had this type of renovation. Dan bought a CarGenerator CG1000 All-Weather to keep his furnace and sump pump working in the winter, and with this week’s crazy rain, we thought it would be a good time to link back to this video again. Whether you need power for emergencies or just for camping and recreation, CarGenerator turns your car into the world's easiest and most reliable off-grid power generator.