Last week, I found about 6" of water in my basement after the float stuck on my sump pump. It is an ancient house (1770) with a rubble foundation. The walls remain dry, with water rising through the floor. Rubble foundations are designed to shed water (the interior wall is flat, the buried exterior wall is angled. think half of a pyramid. The idea is for water to run down through the rocks, rather than into the basement). So this tells me that it is a rising water table that is causing me trouble. There is a dug well in the front yard, about 20 feet from the foundation, where I can more, or less, see the water table. This is an inherited house and I recall my mother (not an engineer) telling me that there had been a drain off the well that was destroyed when they took some of our property for a road (now I live on a corner). Anyway, prior to that the basement didn't flood, according to my mother. The topography is such that creating a drain off the well, below basement floor level, to a lower part of the property wouldn't be a big deal. But, before I rent a ditch witch and go to work, has anyone had any experience with this. Is this wishful thinking?
I haven't given up on the idea of rain water, and will probably extend the downspout drains further away into dry wells. The downspouts do enter the ground now, but I have no idea where they go.