Draining sump pit to a field tile; Cost of horizontal (trenchless) drilling

[urtlking2jo]

I'd be darned surprised if you get 250' bored for anything less than $3k

Thanks for the number. That's in the ballpark of what I was expecting. A little higher than I was hoping ($2k), but it usually is!

 

[LD1]

Just gotta shop around. I dont know your area or the market where you live.

As with anything, its supply and demand.

If there are 10 outfits withing a 50 mile area that do boring, you are gonna get a better price than if you have 2 in a 50 mile area.

Call around, get quotes, then make a decision.

 

[TheMan419]

I'd look into having a back up pump with battery. Those are a couple hundred dollars on Amazon. Spend the cash you save on either a gasoline powered back up generator or consider a whole house that runs off the propane/natural gas. That would help solve a lot of other problems if power outage is frequent for you. You would also then have your water pump running so you would have water at the house.

 

[Deere Dude]

When putting a basement in for our house which was very near a pond in 2004 we got a ton of rain for a long period of time. I put the concrete floor above the water line of the pond. I put two holes in for sump pumps and put two pumps in with separate outlets and separate electrical circuits. One pump would run quite often but the back-up would never run except to test.

Eight years later I was concerned as you are so I pulled one pump and put a 12 volt back-up pump in and kept the battery charged as required.

One evening in the spring the power went out when we were gone. We got home a few hours later and got out the candles to see but noticed the pump wasn't running. I went into the basement and noticed the 12v pump was running very slow and the water was up to the base of the concrete floor. I went out to the pole shed and got my generator and hooked up the main sump pump and refrigerator and fireplace fan plus a few lights.

For me, extra pumps age good and battery backups are nice but if at all possible I would at least trench it out to something below floor level. I was fortunate I came home when I did.

 

[Gary Fowler]

Getting an auto start generator with transfer switch is going to cost you over $3 grand to just run partial house and a whole house will be over $6 grand so your idea of a gravity drain even at $3,000 is the cheaper alternative. Not only is the generator installation costly but then you have to spend money to fuel it. Whole house systems on propane will run 3-4 gallons per hour depending on the load but if ran full time, that gets expensive very fast.

Stick with your plan to run the drain unless you have solid rock to dig thru. I wouldn't worry about renting an excavator and digging a trench. You can route around any trees (PVC is very flexible) and the line doesn't have to be in a straight line just as long as it slopes downhill it is still going to drain.
Any trenching will be invisible in a year or so as long as you properly compact the backfill. Trenching thru the tree roots on one side wont hurt the tree as long as you stay at least 10 feet or more from it. Roots rarely extend past the trees canopy boundary. So a small tree might not even be a 20 foot diameter area. Anyway 10 feet will get you outside of the major foundation roots of the tree and any feeder roots will grow back fairly quickly.

 

[jim44]

When we were house shopping, in one case we would have had to have a waterline bored across a street, probably a total of about 100' of 1 1/4" pipe. The quote for that bore came in at about $8,000, which I read as more likely around $10,000. Didn't need water that bad.