plumbingpumpsewer
Today I was in my basement and it smelled like sewage really bad. When I flushed the basement toilet it had a lot of air push back up into it and into the shower drain too. Like it gurgled a lot. I went to the sewage ejector pit and could hear the pump making a motor sound but it wasn't pumping the sewage. I unplugged it and plugged it back in. It immediately started pumping the sewage and it is now acting fine.
What could have caused this?
Should I be worried?
You are correct that floor drains do need to be monitored and occasionally the trap refilled with water.
So the first thing to check is that your floor drain actually has a trap. The way to do that is to slowly pour water in to the drain. You should notice the water level rise and stay there. If the water disappears quickly then it's likely you don't have a trap.
Provided that the drain does have a trap, the next thing to figure out is why the trap is emptying so quickly. A common cause is something wrong with your vent stack. Problems can range from a blockage, to an improperly vented drain elsewhere, to no venting at all.
A good way to test your vent stack is to flush each toilet one at a time. Enlist a helper and keep an eye on the water in the trap. If one toilet causes the water in the trap to move significantly or drain completely, you have found your problem fixture or vent stack. Fixing this could be as simple as running a garden hose up to your roof and down that vent stack to clear the blockage.
If climbing on the roof is not for you, then a standard house-call charge from a plumber will likely fix it, and that's not usually too expensive.
But if a fixture is incorrectly plumbed or inadequately vented, that can get pricey.
OK... so the mystery has been solved. :-)
The problem got so bad today that the failure rate reached 100% (every time the pump came on it would churn for >30 seconds)... I got a lot of text messages. When I got to the pump, I noticed that during these failures there didn't seem to be any flow at all, and I could feel the pressure build up around the coupler just below the flow control check valve (the one above the ejector pump).
I began to suspect the issue was with this valve, so I took it off and found it was basically just a disk inside a cylinder. It was not attached to anything (no hinge to keep it from flipping over freely). This effectively made the valve stop flow in either direction. I guess that the valve was originally something like this:
The issue may be similar to the issue described in this video, except my valve (American Granby SPCV200) was a swing check valve:
Best Answer
Maybe someone in your family flushed an object that jammed the pump.
I would instruct everyone in the family not to flush anything other than toilet paper and human waste down the toilet in the basement. Especially if you are on a private septic tank system.
Those pumps are pretty tough but can be clogged if you try hard enough.
Continue to monitor the situation for the next few days to see if the pump fails again. If so it needs repair or replacement.
Good luck!