FishinRod,

Thanks for the links. I had done a quick search but hadn't pulled those up. Basically it sounds like you and I had the same idea with a culvert sitting vertical. I spoke with my electrician about pulling power to the pump site and that won't be cheap. Probably around 4K and that's with me laying the wire myself. I was planning on pulling electricity to the lake anyways, so I knew this was going to be a big expense. I briefly looked into solar and battery options but they are all costing around the same amount and I don't have to worry about reliability issues. I need this pump operating at full speed when it's raining, and the sun typically isn't shining during those times. I spoke with the pump company where I source my sewage pumps and they were able to give me some good advice and we figured out that running two of the smaller pumps would actually yield a higher GPM output for only slightly more money. The biggest issue that he saw with my idea is that unlike the trash pumps that I'm use to, these pumps won't handle chunks of bark and twigs very well at all. They are accustomed to human waste, but hard chunks he said would burn them up. The other issue is for the floats to work properly it sounds like I would need a minimum 24" culvert per pump. Really sounds like I will be better off finding some sort of other cage to put the pumps in that I can then surround with different levels of screens to make sure the water is fairly clean by the time it gets to the pumps. The pumps he recommended were the Barnes SE52, however I've seen some Tsunami pumps for quite a bit cheaper that state that they are trash pumps. Other than the Tsunamis requiring more power and maybe being less efficient, I'm not really seeing a difference between them. Was wondering if anyone had an experience with them? My biggest fear is that a flood comes by and rips away my pumps.

Dave, how well did your set up run? Assuming that it didn't get stolen was it worth doing?