If you’ve got a basement bathroom, laundry room, or anything that drains below the main sewer line, there’s a quiet little machine in your home doing a very dirty job: the sewage ejector pump.

And when it stops doing that job… you’ll know.

Not because of a little blinking light.
Because your toilet might burp sewage water back into your shower drain.
Because the basement starts to smell like a porta-potty after a weekend music festival.
Because gravity doesn’t care about your plumbing layout.

“But It Was Working Fine Yesterday…”

That’s the thing with ejector pumps — they work in the background. They don’t complain, don’t beep, don’t text you a warning. Until one day, they give up, and then it’s your problem.

Here’s what we see most often:

• The pump’s motor burns out after years of hard work.
• Something that shouldn’t be flushed (wipes, cotton swabs, small toys…) gets jammed in the impeller.
• The float switch sticks and doesn’t activate when it should.
• The check valve fails, and everything that’s supposed to go out… comes back in.

What Happens Next (That You Don’t Want to Know)

Trust us — you don’t want to ignore this.

We’ve been in homes where the carpet had to be pulled, walls cut open, insulation trashed, and furniture tossed because an ejector pump failed quietly, and nobody noticed until it was too late.

Basement plumbing is a system that depends on that pump. If it’s not working, the whole thing backs up.

How You Know It’s Starting to Fail

• Strange sounds: grinding, humming, or rattling from the pit
• Bad smells: if you smell sewage near the pump, something’s off
• Toilet or drain backups: especially in the lowest level of your home
• The pump runs too much… or not at all

If you’re seeing (or smelling) any of that — you’ve got a window to fix it before it turns into a mess.

Do You Really Need a Plumber?

For this? Yeah.

We’re all for DIY, but ejector pumps deal with raw sewage. You don’t want to stick your hands in there unless you’re sure of what you’re doing.
And even then — diagnosing pump issues isn’t just “replace the part.” Sometimes the pump is fine, and it’s a switch, a clog, or a wiring issue.

What We Do at Golden Valley Plumbing

We’ve replaced pumps buried in mud, unclogged ones full of baby wipes, and reinstalled entire pits that were sinking into the concrete. We don’t guess — we listen, test, inspect, and tell you exactly what’s happening.

If we can fix it, we will.
If it needs replacement, we’ll walk you through the best option for your home and usage — not just the most expensive one.

Dealing with basement backups or weird pump behavior? Let us check it out before it gets worse. We’ll get in, sort it, and get you back to normal.

Your ejector pump isn’t pretty.
But when it fails — the consequences are.

Let’s catch it early.