On Saturday night of this past weekend, a short but severe thunderstorm made me realize two things: 1) the ground was still saturated from a week-long deluge earlier in the month and couldn't absorb any more water, and 2) with hurricane Wilma predicted to hit on Monday night I had better enlist the help of a water pump or my window wells would soon overflow into the basement—again. I don't live in an area that is prone to flooding, and I am grateful for that. But the recent—and unprecedented—wet weather has made me much more conscious of the water problems I face around my house.

Hunting down a water pump after so much rain has hit an area is no easy feat. On Monday afternoon, I tried a Home Depot in New Jersey, where the Penton office is located—no water pumps. When I got home—I live on Long Island—I tried another, again to no avail. Then I tried a Lowe's. Same story, but as I was paying for some other items, like window well covers, I spied a water pump in a shopping cart full of items that had been returned to the store. It was an Attwood WaterBuster cordless water pump. The pump takes three D-cell batteries, so you know it's not too powerful. But I was desperate, so I bought it.

At home on Monday night, it was already raining and water was beginning to congregate (hang out?) around the window well, just waiting for a chance to spill over and start trouble. I put the WaterBuster into the slowly rising water and connected it to a 100-foot hose that snaked out to the street in front of the house. Just so you know, the WaterBuster is really not made for such tasks. It's white and about the size of a large coffee mug. The short hose that comes with it is clear, so the whole thing smacks of daintiness. I wasn't too hopeful.

I pressed the switch and the motor began to whirr. I saw the water travel through the clear hose. I have to admit, I was surprised to see it work. But then the water in the hose seemed to stop flowing. The motor quit. I'm really dumb, I thought, just threw $35 out the window. But Lowe's has a liberal return policy, after all hadn't the WaterBuster been returned once before?

To deal with the immediate problem, I used my wet-dry vac to suck up the water before it got to the window well. This was really a chore, as you might imagine. I spent a long time vacuuming, dumping the water and vacuuming again in an endless cycle until it got so late that I feared the neighbors would start calling my house to complain about the racket.

I went to sleep fearing the worst in terms of water damage, but still thinking about the pump. Why the heck did it stop working? It doesn't have many parts. There was no way that the motor had burned out after a few minutes work. Did the switch go? Not likely.

When I woke up, I found out that Wilma had not pounded Long Island as was predicted, so the basement was dry. That being the case, I had some time to look at the pump. I took it apart and noticed that a small rock had gotten into the impeller and caused the motor to stop turning. A pump is really a simple device. This one had a switch, a watertight compartment for three D-batteries, the impeller blade and the motor. Not much to go wrong. After I cleared the debris, I tried the pump in the sink and actually was surprised at how well it worked.

When the rains started up again, I put the pump to work in the backyard, protecting the window wells. I found out that the pump was not strong enough to pump the water through a 100-foot hose, but worked fine with one about 10-feet long. So I just diverted the water away from the house.

Since the pump is portable, it can only go for about five hours at a time before you have to replace the batteries. And with intermittent rain on Monday, I was in and out of the house turning the pump on and off. I started thinking about an automatic switch. As far as I can tell, all you would need is a water detector in series with the switch that's already there. And as I recall, you can make a water detector fairly easily by constructing a pc-board with traces that sit close to each other, kind of like the fingers of your hands intertwined but not touching. One set of fingers goes to the switch and the other set goes to the battery. When water hits the fingers, the pump turns on—as long as the switch is on.