 Hi, I'm Tom Scherer, agricultural engineer with North Dakota State University Extension Service. Today we're talking about electric backup, some pumps for houses and everybody that has a basement probably has some kind of a some pump already in it, a full basement or even a split level house. This is a submersible pump. It's 120 volt, pretty typical. It's cast iron construction. You can see we've had it in water. This is a check valve so that when the pump shuts off, water in it doesn't flow back through the pump and it goes out the discharge pipe. The backup sum pump is hooked into the same pipe but this is a DC powered pump and it's got a discharge and it's own check valve here and it's own float control. So this is the float control for the primary sum pump and you can see that when it gets up here the water level in here would turn on and the pump would start pumping water and it dropped down and it shut off here. On the backup sum pump you can see that the float is higher up so if the water got up here and this one then turned on, once the water got up to this level, this one would turn on and then the backup sum pump would start the pump and discharge the water into the same discharge pipe outside. Now since this is a DC powered pump, it needs a power source and especially when you don't have primary power to the house if you've lost it during the thunderstorm or some other reason. So the battery is what provides the power. And here we have three different types of batteries. This is a sealed lead acid battery. It's designed for this operation. It's rated in ampere hours. You can see this one is a 40 ampere hour battery. Same type. It's a sealed lead acid. This is a 75 ampere hour. The ampere hours refers to how many amps you can draw for how many hours to power in this case a sum pump. The other type we have, this is a combination. Now most cars and vehicles have a battery that might just have terminals like this and they're rated in cold cranking amps and what that means is that they're designed to put out a lot of current in a short period of time to start the engine. The other type is a long purpose one. These batteries are designed to put out current for a long period of time so there's a different design to them. Now this is a combination. This is a marine deep cycle battery and you can see it has two types of outlets. This is your standard connectors for starting the engines A on a boat. But this would be where the wires to supply all the electronics on a boat might be. And the thing about a deep cycle is it's got both. It can be used to start the engine but it also has enough capacity to run all electricity on the boat especially in emergency situations. Either one of these types is fully acceptable to run with a backup sum pump. This one though you can see has water in it and it's not a sealed lead acid. This is a lead acid battery but it's not sealed. It's pretty typical. Every six months when you're doing a check to make sure that the battery is in good shape you'll have to check the water levels because batteries will evaporate water and it can drop and you'd have to look in the maintenance manual but usually they want you to keep the water above the plates and you can see them in the holes. So that would be another check you'd make every six months just to make sure the water levels in the lead acid battery are appropriate and up where they belong. When you fill it with distilled water, you don't use it off the tap, distilled water is the best. Going with the battery then you've got to have a special charger. This one is a commercial charger that came with the sum pump. It's designed to provide a trickle charge, keep this battery charged for long periods of time because quite often these might be in your basement and be sitting there for six months without running or it may not run if you don't lose power. But the battery needs to be maintained at full voltage so that when you do need an emergency it's ready to go. Now a typical charger that you might use with a car looks like this and you've got the clamps in that. This would not be acceptable for this situation because these are not designed to be hooked to a battery and run for long periods of time and we're talking six months to a year or two years. These are designed specifically to trickle charges and keep them full. This one is designed for charging just battery in a short period of time. This is a typical plastic sump that you might find in any hardware store or home supply store. You can see it's about two feet deep, it's got cutouts here where the drain tile might come in. Now typically the top of this would be flush with the floor so you can see the pump is going to be two feet below the top of the floor typically and the sump and back up sump pump would fit in like this and this would be down below the floor so about this point is about floor level so just to give you some idea and then if you've got a full basement you're lifting in another eight feet up to remove the water. This battery provides all the power for the back up sump pump, it's important to check it periodically. I would recommend about every six months and this part of the world we get snow melt so the early part mid-March would be a good time to check your back up sump pump to make sure the battery is in good shape. The other time might be after first killing frost if we get fall rains a lot of times we can get a lot of flow into our basements because there's no plants using the water. So you want to check the battery so in this case we got it connected to the charger and we have a relatively inexpensive voltmeter here and what we want to do is just check the voltage and in this case you see it's reading around 14 that would be that's with the charger on we can unplug the charger and then just check the voltage you see it's about 13.7 which is a very acceptable range you want it well above 12.7 when it's sitting there with no load on it but the other important measurement you have to make is when there's an actual load on it because even though the battery reads a correct voltage when you put a load on start drawing current it may actually be quite a bit lower the charger is unplugged and now we're going to put a load on it we're putting water into the sump and we'll measure the voltage under load so that we can see if the battery voltage stays fairly constant and doesn't drop too much when it starts to pump so you can hear the sump pump turned on it's running it's pumping water it's dropped to about 12.7 that's very good and that's what you would want if it drops down to 11.5 then your battery might be getting weaker old and it might be time to consider replacing it one of the questions we get asked a lot is how much actual protection will your backup sump pump provides that's its battery powered now we set up a test stand in the lab here and we set it up just like you would from a normal house with a full basement and we measured the amp draw on the pump and we found on this particular DC pump it draws about 10 amps so we tested it with this 40 amp hour battery under continuous pumping now that's the worst-case scenario you got so much water coming in at the pump is just running continuously this provided about three and a half hours before the battery ran out this 75 amp hour battery provided about six and three-quarter hours of protection so if you take 75 divided by 10 you get seven and a half hours it takes a little it's a little less than what the rating is with this motor this one is an 84 amp hour battery and it provided about seven and a half hours of protection now if you had a bottom or a bigger battery that had about 120 amp hours of protection that would have provided about 11 hours of continuous pumping but most the time some pumps don't pump continuously so the second test we did was we set it up so that the pump only ran once every four minutes which is still quite a frequent pumping interval and the the smaller battery here at a 48 amp hour provided about 32 hours with the pump running every four minutes for about 15 seconds the battery is actually able to recover a little bit between times the 75 provided about 60 hours protection or about two and a half days or so of this intermittent pumping and this one provided about 68 hours so it's almost three days now if you bought the 120 amp per hour battery that would provide about 96 hours or almost four days worth of intermittent pumping before the battery would go out on you so in an emergency situation if your battery is going along you've been out that long and it's pumping quite a bit you can always go out to a vehicle in an emergency situation you could substitute in a battery a 12-volt battery out of a riding motor out of a boat or out of a pickup or a car to give you that extra protection you need. I'm Ken Halevang agricultural engineer with the NDSU Extension Service. Tom went through things in our lab relating to the backup sump pump now we're in a home and we're going to actually look at an in-home installation so here we have the sump that Tom was talking about it's down below the floor level we have our main sump pump at the bottom in this case rather than having the backup sump pump sitting beside the main sump this installation has the sump with the battery power the backup sump pump sitting a little bit higher than the primary sump and then we also have the same check valve and connections that we saw in the laboratory in this case the the power comes from this battery that's sitting in this protective case and frequently they will be in some type of case so that we're protecting the battery and we're protecting the floor in case there's any acids that come out of that battery in the lab we saw the trickle charger was separate from the actual battery case in this case here is the trickle charger and the way that this is installed the line or electric line comes from the backup sump pump comes into the trickle charger here and then in this case we have now the switch that goes back down and is adjusted so that the float is higher than that primary sump so if the primary sump would fail then that switch would lift and activate and turn on the the backup sump pump the power is coming from the battery that is in this case and we'll just lift off the lid so that we can see here the battery sitting in in this case this is a deep cycle battery marine type that we discussed previously that has the pulse where the power comes from the battery to operate that backup sump pump and then the trickle charger has another cord that goes over and is plugged into the wall and we're constantly trickle charging the battery so it's important as Tom was indicating for us to verify that that whole system is operating check the water level in the battery check the sump to make sure that that backup sump pump switch does turn the pump on make sure that we're keeping the charge adequate and in this case they have a light readout that will indicate the level of charge so this will then provide some backup protection for the home in case the primary sump pump fails or if the power goes out that this electric DC powered backup system will then start operating and keep your basement and home dry