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The previous owners of my house installed a sump pit in my semi-detached bungalow. The sump pit is located next to the inside wall (the wall I share with my neighbour), so I cannot drill a hole through it for the drain or I'd be flooding my neighbour's basement. Instead I will have to run the drain pipe across the basement to the outside wall. This requires probably about 20 feet of pipe, and it will probably have to go up about 8ft to get over the wall.

My question is, will having such a high and long drain pipe create any issues with the effectiveness of the drain? I will be using a check valve.

The reason the owners install the sump pit next to the inside wall rather than the outside wall is because this location has easy access to the weeping tile. They are currently draining the pump into the city sewer, which in major storms is useless because the drain will back-up.

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  • When you turn the corner on the pipe use a long sweeping 90 elbow to turn and not a short one. A short elbow is equivalent to 9 ft of pipe. A long sweep is equivalent to a 6 ft of pipe. That is not huge, but you just as well get as much out of our pump as you can.
    – Be Kind To New Users
    Oct 24, 2018 at 22:53

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The main thing you will need to pay attention to is the head rating of the sump pump. I can't imagine a standard big box store sump pump would have any trouble raising the water 8 feet...every sump I've ever owned had to go at least that high. The horizontal run has a negligible effect on the capability of the pump (it's not zero, but it is very small compared to the vertical portion.)

Yo uwill need to make sure that the pump can discarge enough water at the head height to keep up with the flow of water into the pit. This is most often a guessing game, unless you know the volume of the pit and can time how long it takes to fill up under the worst conditions (perhaps a severe rain storm).

A pump curve tells you the flow performance (measured in gallons per minute or liters per minute) of a pump relative to the head pressure. To read a pump curve, you must first examine the units of measurement used along each of the displayed axes. The pictured pump curve displays head pressure in Feet (along the left-side y-axis) and in Meters (along the right-side y-axis). Increased head pressure is indicated as you travel up the y-axis. The flow performance is indicated in gallons per minute (along the lower x-axis) and liters per minute (along the upper x-axis). This is an indication of the output flow of a pump.

The pump curve is read by first determining the head pressure of the application in which the pump will be used. Once you’ve determined your head pressure, simply follow the head value you have selected from the y-axis horizontally to where it intersects with the pump curve line. From that point, move vertically to the flow measurement on the x-axis.

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Head Pressure

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