Flooded basement? We find where the water is coming from

While you wait for the plumber

If the water is clean and coming from a pipe, a fixture or the water heater, shut off the main water valve. It is usually where the water line enters the basement wall, often near the meter.

If the water looks or smells like sewage, keep everyone out of the basement and stop using water anywhere in the house. No toilets, no showers, no laundry. Every litre you send down the drain comes straight back up through the lowest opening, and right now that is your basement floor.

Do not walk into standing water that has reached outlets, the furnace, the water heater or the electrical panel. Cut the power at the panel only if you can reach it without standing in water. If you cannot, stay out and call your utility.

Do not pump or shop vac the water into the floor drain if the floor drain is what is backing up. It comes back.

Lift what you can off the floor and photograph everything before you clean up. Your insurer will ask, and sewer backup claims get denied over missing evidence more often than over anything else.

Then call us. If you are not sure what you are looking at, describe it on the phone and we will tell you whether it needs a truck tonight or can wait until morning.

Where the water shows up tells us a lot

Basement flooding is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Six completely different problems leave the same puddle on the floor, and the repair for one does nothing for another. The first thing our plumber does is work out which one you have.

Water rising out of the floor drain usually means a blocked building drain or sewer line, and it needs drain cleaning and a camera. Sewage or grey water with a strong smell points to a sewer blockage, roots or a collapsed line. Clear water near the sump pit after rain is the pump, the float or the discharge. Water spreading out from one pipe or from the water heater is an active supply leak. Damp along the wall and floor joint after a storm points to weeping tile or foundation drainage. A wet basement with no rain and no storm often means a concealed leak under the slab.

If you can tell us which of those matches what you are seeing, we can usually bring the right equipment on the first trip instead of the second.

Sewer backup in the basement

Sewage in the basement is the one that cannot wait. A blocked or overloaded sewer line has nowhere to send wastewater, so it pushes back through the lowest opening in the house.

You will usually get warnings first. Toilets gurgle when the washing machine drains. Two or three fixtures slow down in the same week. A smell that comes and goes. By the time water is on the floor, the blockage has been building for a while.

The cause is normally roots, a grease and wipe blockage, a bellied section of pipe or a collapsed line. We clear the blockage, then put a camera down to see what caused it, because a line that backed up once will do it again if the pipe itself is the problem.

Until a plumber has looked at it, stop using water in the house.

The basement floor drain is backing up

The floor drain is almost never the problem. It is just the lowest hole, so it is where the water announces itself. The blockage is usually further along the building drain or out in the sewer lateral.

That matters for the repair. Snaking the floor drain itself buys you an afternoon. Finding the actual restriction, which may be twenty metres away under the front lawn, fixes it.

If your floor drain has backed up more than once, ask for the camera. Recurring backups are almost always a physical defect in the pipe: roots at a joint, a cracked section, a sag holding water, or old clay tile that has shifted.

The sump pump failed

The usual suspects are a burned out motor, a float switch stuck against the side of the pit, a frozen or blocked discharge line, a pump that is undersized for the water it is being asked to move, and no power at all. A pump with no battery backup does nothing during an outage, and outages and heavy rain tend to arrive together.

We test the pump, the float, the check valve and the discharge, and replace what has failed. If the pit is filling faster than the pump can empty it, the answer is a bigger pump or a second one, not a repair.

Most residential sump pumps have a working life of under a decade. If yours is older than that and it just flooded, replacing it costs less than the next flood.

The basement floods after heavy rain

Rain flooding is a drainage problem wearing a plumbing costume. The water is already outside the foundation, and something that is supposed to move it away has stopped doing that.

Look at the sump pit first, then at where the water enters. Water at the pit points to the pump or its discharge. Water along the wall and floor joint points to weeping tile, a blocked drain around the footing, or grading that sends the downspouts back toward the house. Water only during the very heaviest storms often means the system is fine but undersized.

We can inspect the pump, the discharge line and the weeping tile connections and tell you which one you are dealing with. If it turns out to be exterior waterproofing or grading, we will say so rather than sell you a pump you do not need.

Worth knowing: several Ontario municipalities subsidise backwater valves, sump pumps and pipe severance for exactly this problem. The work usually has to be done by a licensed plumber under permit, so check the terms before you book anything.

A pipe is leaking or has burst

A burst supply line does not care about the weather. It puts clean water into the basement at mains pressure, and a small line can move enough to flood a finished basement in under an hour.

Shut the main valve first, then call. Once the water stops, the repair is usually straightforward: a section of pipe, a failed joint, a corroded connection at the water heater, a valve that let go.

Winter is different. A pipe that froze and split often does not reveal itself until it thaws, and there is frequently more than one break in the same run.

Water is coming through the wall or the floor joint

This one is honest territory. Water entering through a crack, a wall, or the joint where the wall meets the floor is not a plumbing failure, and no amount of drain work will stop it.

What we can do is rule the plumbing out, which is worth doing first, because a slow leak in a supply line under the slab looks exactly like foundation seepage until someone tests for it. We use leak detection equipment to check. If the plumbing is clean, the problem is drainage or the foundation itself, and we will tell you what kind of contractor you actually need.

Sending you to someone else costs us the job. It also means you are not paying us to fix the wrong thing.

What the visit looks like

A licensed plumber arrives with a fully stocked truck, day or night.

The first job is finding the source. That means checking the floor drain, the sump pit, the visible plumbing and the point where the water enters. Ten minutes of looking saves an hour of the wrong repair.

You get the price before anything happens. Written, itemised, and it does not change once work starts.

Most blockages and pump failures are done in the same visit. If the camera finds a broken sewer line, that is a second appointment and a separate quote, and we will tell you that on the spot rather than after we have started digging.

Before we leave, we check what caused it and whether it will happen again. If the answer is yes, you get a written recommendation, not a hard sell.

What a plumber handles, and what comes after

We stop and repair the plumbing or drainage source: the blockage, the broken line, the failed pump, the leaking pipe.

What we do not do is restoration. Extracting large volumes of standing water, drying out the structure, pulling wet drywall and insulation, sanitising after a sewage backup: that is a water damage restoration company, and after sewage it is not optional. We will tell you when you need one.

Fix the source first. Drying a basement that is still taking on water is money spent twice.