Where to drill a hole in the discharge pipe. Image from pumps-in-stock.com.

Carefully placing a hole in the discharge pipe from a sump pump avoids vapor lock. Doing so 5 years ago would have saved me thousands of dollars, avoided damage to my finished basement, avoided multiple visits from a plumber, and saved me tons of stress. Since drilling the hole there has been no vapor lock and there has been no flooding. But unfortunately I didn’t know what to search for. I didn’t know about vapor lock.

Some background: Just about everyone I know in St. Louis has problems with water coming into their basement. We’re no exception. Shortly after we moved in, we had a heavy rain and our sump pump overflowed, soaking the carpet in the basement. We assumed a power outage was to blame. It happened several more times, the walls and carpets were a moldy wreck, so we finally gave up and ripped everything out. After a long drawn-out battle with our insurance company - proving that they mistakenly gave us “volcano coverage” instead of “basement coverage” - we finally got the 5 grand to refinish the basement. (Aside: how much you wanna bet it was a shitty policy setup interface that caused the agent to make that mistake. Reject flood insurance in Missouri? But take volcano? Gimme a break.)

Then it happened again. We knew it wasn’t due to a power outage because we were in the basement at the time, and we watched as the sump pump made noise while water came flowing out of the pit. Next we assumed it was clogged in the pipes leading to the street. We spent a weekend digging up the pipes. We even put in two backup valves close to the house, so water wouldn’t get pushed back in. But the flooding continued.

You would think I would find something on Google, but the bitch of it was not knowing what to look for. It’s amazing how easy it is to find something once you know the key phrase. In this case, the phrase was vapor lock. In the pipe leading from the sump pump is a check valve that prevents water from coming back down. So when the pump stops, the valve shuts. The problem is a vacuum is created in this process, which prevents the valve from opening again. Water can’t get pumped out, the pump makes noise like it is working just fine, but the water backs up and your basement gets flooded.

The solution to sump pump vapor lock is very simple. All you need to do is drill a hole in the pipe, between the sump pump and the backup valve. When the water is being pumped out, it goes right by the hole. Then when the pump stops, the water left in the pipe shoots out as the pressure is relieved. There probably is a “nicer” solution, but that fact that you can solve the vapor lock problem while your basement is flooding is super-cool.

On our particular setup, the valve is a couple of inches above the top of the pit. So I drilled a small hole between the pump and the valve. The mistake that I made, which you should avoid, is placing the hole too close to the top of the pit. My hole was even angled such that water shoots up over the edge of the pit - as if the pipe was taking a whaz. So I have to make sure the cover is on to deflect the water into the pit. When you do this, make sure the hole is down an inch or two from the top, and angled downward.

In conclusion I am happy to report that our basement has not flooded since.

P.S. Here’s the site that saved the day for me: Sump Pump Installation on pumps-in-stock.com.
P.S.S. I have no idea why the 2 plumbers that visited replaced my sump pump, didn’t check for a hole, and didn’t even mention it. For shame.

UPDATE 2/26: Thanks to everyone who attended. Those I have heard from said they enjoyed. I’ll update this post with the recording when it is available.

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I’ll be doing a Perficient Perspectives webinar on February 26th. Checkout the marketing team’s writeup below, and then head over here if you want to register to attend. (It’s free.)

In today’s economic environment, it’s more important than ever to ensure your customers have the best user experience possible. An online solution like a website can lose credibility if it doesn’t “look and feel” as good as other sites, when it isn’t easy to use, and when support costs skyrocket due to technical issues and poor user satisfaction.

With budgets tight you may not be able to begin new projects just yet, but you can make sure the experiences you do offer keep your users coming back for more. You need a customer experience that scales well to larger markets, is sticky for both old and new customers alike, is pleasing to the eye, easy to use and much more – all without increased support costs.

Join us for this installment of Perficient Perspectives as Nathan Verrill, Perficient Solution Architect, Interaction Design, shares insight and experience gleaned over the last 12 years as a User Experience professional. Nathan will share his observations on the most common customer experience mistakes to avoid in order to keep current users happy while engaging new users in a tough economy.

Speaker Nathan Verrill is a Solution Architect, Interaction Design in Perficient’s nationally renowned User Experience practice with more than 12 years of experience across a wide range of consulting projects focused on identifying and delivering web-based and other user experience solutions. His areas of expertise include interaction design, contextual inquiry, usability testing and persona development. He has participated across all project phases including discovery, design and production at marquee clients including United Health Care, Anheuser-Busch and Charter Communications. Nathan has presented at numerous conferences and events including the Hawaii Research Center for Futures Studies, Usability Professionals Association, and is the co-founder of the St. Louis chapter of the Interaction Designers Association.

Hey Canon Your Video Switch Sucks from Nathan Verrill on Vimeo.

Figure 1: Illustration of the current design.

Figure 2: Illustration of my changes to the design.

Two interaction designers (George Luc and myself), along with a handful of Indians, show us why the Camera-Video-Review switch sucks on what otherwise are great digital cameras.

In Figure 2, the video and camera modes are swapped and nubbins are added between the video and camera position. Swapping mode positions makes it more likely the user will switch to the camera mode accidentally, which is probably their intent. The nubbins assist this further by requiring additional effort to push the switch into the video position.

It is presumed these adjustments would require fewer changes to the engineering and manufacture of the camera.

This is my gripe list. Please add comments with what bothers you, and maybe the Lotus product manager or your IT department will take note.

• A third mental model. I’ve been using Outlook forever and started using GMAIL shortly after it launched. Admittedly, GMAIL required a different set of behaviors and expectations than Outlook, but that was OK because ultimately it was a much more efficient and rewarding experience. So do I really need a third set of expectations for the behavior of an email client? Perhaps if there was any value provided, but for me anyway, there is no value-add for Lotus Notes. I’m sure many of you feel the same way. Lotus Notes must absolutely rock from a management & IT department perspective. Too bad it sucks from a user’s perspective.
• Cannot accept or decline a meeting invitation from the preview pane.
• The web mail version is ridiculously heavy, chock full of Tuftian chart crud, and defaults to the heavy mode - not only that, it doesn’t remember your “light mode” preference, so you have to wait for the crappy heavy version to load first. Slow. Cumbersome. Frustrating.
• I have to open email and calendar items to perform common actions such as Reply To All and Accept Invitation. I can’t execute these actions from the preview pane. I think I had Reply To All at one point in time, but it isn’t there anymore. Not sure why it left, if it ever really was there, or how to get it back.
• And how the hell do I mark items as unread? I just switched computers and when Notes updated it pulled down all my email as unread. I searched and searched in the menu structure, both up top and via right-click. Where would you expect it? Actions > Mark Unread? RIght Click: Mark Unread? Hah! Neither. The brilliant IBM engineer / designers decided to put it in Edit > Unread Marks > Mark Selected Unread. Brilliant! Now why didn’t I think of that? Tip of the hat to these sites for more info on this topic: Lotus Notes and Me and the Official Lotus Notes Sucks Website.
• I t i s s o s l o w……………………………..
• The calendar accept/decline/update logic absolutely sucks. For example, I recently got an update to a recurring meeting from a client fortunate enough to be using MS Outlook. (Wow, they are SO lucky. I bet their more productive and don’t swear at their email client everyday.) Anyway, when I accept the invitation I get this message “Part or all of this meeting is already on your calendar. You must decline those entries first before processing this notice.” The first part of the message lets us know that it detected entries and understands the relationship. Why the hell can’t it just do this - my goal is to have an up-to-date calendar, not to “process” notices. I think this might be the worst widely-used enterprise wide application used on a daily basis by non-experts.
• The out of office functionality makes no sense. Too many options. The options when you open the settings window (if you can find it, as it is hidden in Actions > More > Out of Office — WTF) there are a number of indeciperable settings and then three actions: “Enable and Close”, “Save and Close” and “Cancel.” So when I went to turn it off (because the upgrade thought it was on when really it was not and it kept sending me annoying notices) I just went for what I thought was the Save button and OOPS hit the Enable and Close button by mistake. Doh! Hey Lotus Notes developers and product managers, don’t you know users rarely read? You really should do yourself a favor and quit your job. And make sure you lie on your resume - not a good idea to let people know you worked on this awful application.
• The size of the thumb in the scrollbar isn’t quite right. It appears to me that it is scrolled all the way to the top until I see there are unread items in the inbox, and then I scroll up some more. See the screenshot below. I have 2 unread emails, but the thumbsize and placement makes it appear that I’m at the top of the list. Rest assured it is currently sorted by date/time with most recent on top. What I want to do is grab that thumb easily and slam it to the top so I can see those new messages…….. But no, can’t do that, need to very carefully acquire that teeny tiny target and scoot it up. Fitz’ Law anyone?