A sump pump is a crucial part of your home's drainage system—one that hardly ever gets any thought or attention. If you do give it a thought, it's probably only during routine home maintenance or during a big storm. But your sump pump needs a little love if you want to keep your home and belongings safe. In fact, it needs backup. Here are four reasons why you need a backup sump pump

1. Because of how crucial it is to save your house's foundation

The main function of a sump pump is to prevent flooding, right? Wrong! Its purpose is to improve drainage so your foundation won't be damaged by moisture. Okay, so these two purposes are pretty closely related, but the point is that it's just as important to keep your foundation safe from water damage as it is to keep floodwaters from creeping up your basement stairs. In fact, your home's foundation can suffer water damage in a number of ways, not all of which are related to flooding. For example:

• Increased moisture content in the soil around your foundation can expand the soil and start to push your foundation walls inward
• Water can soak into pilings and cause rot in cases of foundations that rest on pilings
• Water can erode the soil around and under your foundation, causing it to collapse, or it can even erode the foundation itself

2. Because it's so infrequently used

You don't think about your sump pump every day, do you? Well, maybe if you're a plumber you do, but otherwise, probably not. And if you live in an area where drainage is pretty good and you don't often have storms, your sump pump could go months between uses, meaning that you're unlikely to be alerted if it stops working until there's a crisis. And if there is a crisis and you don't have a backup, you could end up with some very expensive flooding and foundation damage.  

3. Because it's easy to set it and forget it

Setting up a backup sump pump isn't all that hard if you're a handy homeowner, and it's a fairly simple installation for a professional if you don't want to get your hands dirty. Then all you have to do is make sure it's set up to kick on when needed, and you're good to go!  

4. Because you can set it to use an alternate power source

Do you frequently or regularly have power outages in your area? If your current sump pump is dependent on the power grid, having a backup that you can hook up to an off-grid source (such as a generator) can protect you against not only sump pump malfunction during a storm, but also against flooding that happens at the same time as a power failure (possibly caused by the same storm).  

To learn more about why you should have a backup sump pump installed, contact a plumber at a company like The King's Helper.