Sump pump: repair it or replace it
A misbehaving sump pump puts its owner in a bad spot for a decision: the stakes are a finished basement, the deadline is the next wet week, and the machine is sitting in a dark pit where nothing about it is obvious. The good news is that the decision tree is short.
The problems that are not the pump
Start outside the machine. A tripped GFCI or breaker is the most common “dead pump” in existence. A float jammed against the pit wall or fouled by debris stops a healthy pump cold, and freeing it is a reach into the pit, not a service call. A check valve that has failed lets every lifted gallon fall straight back, which looks like a pump that cannot keep up. And a discharge line that is frozen or blocked makes a working pump useless: it runs, hums, and moves nothing.
All of these cost little to fix and none of them mean the pump is done. The tell they share: the motor still sounds strong when it runs.
The signs the pump itself is finishing
Age is the first input: a pump is a wear item, and one past its expected span is living on borrowed time regardless of how it sounds today. The behavioural signs: running noticeably longer to move the same water, a grinding or rattling note that was not there last spring, short-cycling that persists after the float and check valve have been ruled out, and any history of tripping its breaker under load. Two or more of those together, on an aging unit, is the machine answering the question for you.
The context matters as much as the machine: a pit that cycles all spring on clay ground is critical equipment, and critical equipment gets replaced on schedule, not on failure. A pit that runs twice a year can reasonably ride longer.
If you replace, the two questions that matter
Capacity should match the pit’s real workload (the wet-spring workload, not the July one), and oversizing has its own cost in short-cycling. And the backup question should be answered at the same time, because the marginal cost of adding battery backup during a replacement is far lower than adding it after the night it was needed. A backup earns its keep on the night the power fails and on the day the primary quits with no warning at all; clay-ground houses with finished basements eventually meet one of them.
Electrical work and permanent plumbing connections belong to licensed trades. The checks described here (power, float, check valve, discharge) are observation, not repair.