Highly skilled mechanical engineers to the rescue

Doing laundry today, I heard the sound of water spilling onto the floor. This did not make me happy, so I ran into the bathroom where our washing machine is kept, and saw water spilling out of the bucket pump.

See, we put our washer in our bathroom, in our second-floor apartment (first floor for you Brits out there). And where we put it, there wasn’t enough room to get a gravity drain into the sewer line, the way that one likes to. So we had to install a “bucket pump.” This is a bucket that sits on the floor, and the waste water from the washing machine goes into the bucket through one pipe, and then there’s a pump in the bucket, and it pumps the water up and out of a second pipe , and that moves the waste water up and over to the sewer outflow pipe.

It works pretty well.

Except it wasn’t.

So I turned off the washing machine, and called around to plumbers. Who are mostly busy dealing with frozen pipes. So I left a bunch of messages with answering services.

One of the plumbers called me back. He said that, for a non-emergency like this (and it IS a non-emergency -- I can’t wash clothes, but I’ve got water in the kitchen, the toilet works, the shower works, and so forth), they couldn’t get to me before Tuesday. But . . . had I tried kicking the thing?

“What?”

“Kick it. Bucket pumps tend to be very durable. But they have a float switch which tells them to turn on the pump when the water fills up, and that gets stuck sometimes. So, try kicking it, and if that doesn’t work, go ahead and call me back and we’ll set up an appointment.”

So I kicked it.

Now it works.

Yay, mechanical engineering! And percussive maintenance!