Its October, and our clients are calling on a daily basis.  Wait, our responsible clients are calling and getting their pump systems checked, maintained, and tested.  Why do we do this?  Its a pretty easy question to answer.

Pumps are a mechanical system.  They are prone to fail.  People was their cars, clean gutters, get landscaping work completed.  What happens to all the debris?  It gets flushed down the catch basins, into the main drainage sump, and if people pump, some of this debris gets pumped up into the municipal storm system and taken away.  What some people don’t realize is, the debris causes premature wear and tear on their pumps, or in some cases, the engineered designs, have specified a pump that doesn’t handle solid debris as efficiently as just pumping clean water.  Well, Vancouver drainage pumps don’t pump only clean water.

Pumps wear out, floats wear out and fail, check valves break.  We now only install cast iron check valves because these are not susceptible to failure like the plastic check valves that are typically installed in residential systems (cheaper).

 We now also have duplex panels that are designed to track run time and cycle time.  This allows us to use this data to predict how long pumps run during certain applications, or to see if they cycle too much.  Maybe the design criteria doesn’t match what’s actually happening.  Pump station design is both static and dynamic when it comes to design.  Ground water is an unknown.  The systems we install and maintain assist us in what is happening.  

This is why we perform maintenance.  Ideally yearly maintenance is the best option: however, at least every few years your pump station should be maintained.  Anything other than that, you have a high risk of failure.