The safety of your household is certainly one of your main concerns. If you have a basement, this is an area that you must keep your eye on as heavy rainstorms can cause water levels to raise quickly, causing a potential flood. As flooding occurs, other severe issues appear, more precisely mold and mildew, and the furniture and other objects found in this area of the house can be damaged irremediably.

For your peace of mind, what you should do is to install a sump pump that will remove the water that gathers in the sump basin of the basement. Unfortunately, the pump can fail at times due to malfunctions, skipped maintenance work, or power failures. This is where the alarm comes in. Learning more about the importance of installing a sump pump alarm and how to test and maintain this device by reading the rest of our article.

What Is the Sump Pump Alarm?

A quality sump pump alarm is an irreplaceable installation to make as it plays an important role when it comes to the safety of the house that you live in. What this alarm does is that it gets triggered when the sump pump doesn’t work for various reasons, such as a power outage or any type of malfunction. Also, the alarm announces you when the water reaches a certain level. Basically, it works pretty much like a smoke alarm, producing a loud noise to ensure that you are aware when there are issues with an impending flood.

Benefits Provided By Installing the Alarm

As we have already mentioned, the role of the alarm is to announce you when certain situations occur, situations that could cause the flooding of the basement. Learn more about the advantages provided by this much-needed installation to better understand its role and the benefits that accompany it from the following two sections of the article.

Flood Warning

There are many situations when the sump pump will fail to do its job. The most common are power failures, in case you don’t have a battery backup sump pump, and other issues can appear as well, more precisely various malfunctions that cause it to stop working. When any type of wear and tear happens to the sump pump, the alarm alerts you of the occurrence. Also, it warns you before the flooding of the basement occurs for you to be able to take action in time and remedy the situation.

Insurance Companies Might Pay for the Installation

Another advantage that you might not be aware of is the fact that many insurance companies are willing to pay for the installation of the alarm. It’s in the best interest of insurance companies for your basement to not flood as they have to pay for the property damages. Thus, if you’re in luck and the insurance company that you work with puts its own interests first, you will receive a free installation of the sump pump alarm.

How to Check if the Alarm Is Working Properly

Considering the reasonable price that even the best quality alarms come at, it’s a shame to not invest in one that takes away any need to perform check-ups. High-end sump pump alarms feature low battery notifications that usually take the form of a blinking light, some models even sending off an audible alarm in case the battery drainage is critical. Thus, there’s no actual need to perform any tests yourself as you will be alerted when maintenance needs to be done on it. In case the alarm is able to send notifications of any form to devices such as smartphones or laptops, there should be a no internet notification feature as well. This feature announces you if there is no connection to the internet so that you know to fix the issue and receive alarms remotely on various devices in case you’re away from home.

Useful Maintenance Tips

What you must know from the start is the fact that the sump pump and the alarm are linked to each other, reason why you should actually perform regular maintenance work on both devices. Yes, the role of the alarm is more important as it not only announces you when there is the possibility of a flood to occur, but it alerts you when the sump pump is malfunctioning as well. But this doesn’t mean that you should neglect the sump pump itself as this is the device that handles the evacuation of the water and that prevents floods in the first place. Therefore, there are two basic maintenance work tasks that you must perform, one of the sump pump, and one on the alarm.

When it comes to sump pump alarm maintenance, what you need to do is to check the device’s batteries regularly to make sure that they are working properly and change them when they appear to be out of power. This way, you will be ensured that the device is going to do its job properly at all times. When it comes to sump pump maintenance, the main task that you have to perform is to clean out any debris stuck in it as this is the most common cause of malfunction.