Necessity is the mother of invention

Hurricanes Florence (September) and Michael (October) came through North Carolina in 2018 bringing plenty of winds and even more rain. The soil mix in North Carolina requires great drainage to keep water moving away from homes, businesses, etc.

The drainage around my house’s foundation had an exit path, away from the house, that had been cut off during a renovation project. The foundation drainage also had a section of pipe into my crawlspace, allowing water that got in there to drain out. With the exit path cut off, my crawlspace became the exit path.

The amount of water from hurricanes in back to back months had literally hundreds of gallons of water backing up into my house’s crawlspace. I needed to get water moving quickly so I could concentrate on the problem … the drainage.

I used a sump pump to drain the crawlspace and then began focusing on fixing the drainage problem. I dug to the foundation drainpipe to begin laying new piping away from the house. For the drain pipe connecting into the crawlspace, I dug a hole in the crawlspace to put a catch basin, to provide a water exit path.

The catch basin hole kept filling with water from water that had been trapped in the foundation drainpipe. I needed to get something into the hole big enough to remove gallons of water at a time rather than ounces or cups.

I developed Up The Hatch for this very purpose. The bottom hole pattern of the Up The Hatch bucket enabled me to push it straight down into the standing water and fill through the bottom. Once I had captured at least a gallon of water I lifted the Up The Hatch bucket and the inner seals were pushed down by the captured water weight, sealing the water inside.

The concept was to use a vessel:

large enough to capture a gallon or more at a time
that wasn’t wider than the catch basin hole
that could fill from the bottom so the vessel didn’t need to be tipped to the side

The design for Up The Hatch was out of necessity … necessity for a quick, easy, reliable way to get large amounts of water out of a catch basin hole.