Laying out the pond, calculations, etc.

Ground breaking: July 19. Started digging, but without much of a plan as yet.

After a long break for some really bad hot weather and not knowing what I'm doing and just getting stalled in general, I continued working. Pretty much all I did was move the stock tank to the correct approx position and figure out that I will put the vortex filter at the end of the deck.

This is actually two days worth of work, one to level frame and pour the pad and one for digging the pond.

More digging.

Started building the Skippy biofilter using Gene's mod.

I figured out how to fix the problem with the Skippy. I needed to use flush adapters. Continued digging the deep part of the pond and ran into this... thing. Consensus on the forum seems to be this is a capped off well or cistern rather than a septic tank (good!).

Started digging the trech to the pit that will hold the vortex and drain catcher (each a 55 gallon drum).

Decided to run the trench to the end of the deck where i was originally planning to put the vortex and drain catcher drums. The photos show I'm almost done with the trench. I think it takes about an hour to dig 4 feet.

Continuing the vortex pit. The "before" photos were actually taken on day10.

Still (!) continuing the vortex pit. I also checked level with respect to water line. The ground is 6" above water line. I've dug down about 40 inches so I have about 4 more inches to go (35" for drum + 6" down to waterline - 1" above waterline + 4" concrete pad). It just started raining and the radar shows a line coming this way so it might be a day or two before I finish that. Still have the Skippy to finish in the garage, though.

So what have I been doing for the last week and a half? Last Sunday, I was a guest for the Mississippi Valley Watergarden Society meeting/pond tour. I will join once I get my pond finished. I remembered that I was going to run an air line to the bottom drain for adding a diffuser later, so I had to order more Uniseals and do some more research. Obtained 55 gallon drums from one of the car wash places (free!). I decided to make the pit a bit wider and longer after I put the 55 gallon drums in it. I added a channel to the vortex pit for the vortex drain, instead of digging the whole floor deeper. Lowes, etc. didn't have the right type of 3" shower drains, so I am going with 2" drain for now on the vortex. I also finished the skippy.

I made the vortex cone and then started to fill the void that would be under the cone with concrete, but decided that was going to be way too heavy. I dumped the concrete into the pit to fill in one end of it and then cut some plywood to form up the sides of the channel. I also made the support for inside the skippy out of 1/2" PVC.

I prepped the bottom drain and attempted to make bends in PVC by heating.

I dug out some of the shallower shelves in the pond and installed the skimmer.

Labor day weekend was good, i made good progress, but not much since then. i found out my vortex drain leaks, but my skimmer and BD don't (no liner yet). this morning i futilely attempted to connect 4" BD piping around a ~70deg corner. gonna try that bending technique again over lunch break. i have a 60deg elbow on it now, so i only need 10 more degrees aaaaaack! i thought i had it dry fitted correctly with a slight angle on the 45 elbow on the pipe angling up from the bottom, but it dried at the wrong angle ... darn those gremlins!!! EDIT: got it bent, need to check for leaks.

I still have not found a way to plug the bottom drain so I can check for leaks in plumbing above it. I saw a balloon thing at Menards that goes in a 2" opening and then pumps up. I didn't see how big it gets, though or what to pump it with. I have a 4" plug but the disc on the thumb screw side is bigger than the plug gets, so i can't put it in far enough for the plug part to seal. wrapping it with a shirt worked a little better but still leaked. I asked Juana if she had any good ideas for plugging the drain and she said, "Hair!"

There are not many pictures here for the amount of time I spent. I tested the vortex again with more water (ok) and tested skippy (leaking around shower drains as I expected since I installed similarly to the original vortex shower drain - i.e. not enough goop). The big project was building the housing for the vortex pit, which I was able to finish. I cut 3 of the sides part way down so I could slide them out and cut the holes for the pipes in the proper places.

I didn't get hardly anything done the last week until the weekend, so I will count this as two days. This weekend, I filled in around the bottom drain so I could install the TPR pipe. I also ran more skimmer piping, finished BD and diffuser piping to the vortex pit. I put skippy back in place for another test (I think it still leaks). I unrolled the liner and installed the liner ring on the bottom drain. Last, I installed the sump pump in the drain barrel.

I took the day off work and spent a lot of the day working on the pond. I woke up at 5am dreaming about pipe fittings and couldn't get back to sleep. I started filling the pond, but I really need the air diffuser before I can do that. I started the pipe boot for the TPR (the hose clamp got put on my parts list). It took about an hour and a half to connect the 4" pipe from the bottom drain to the vortex due to the pipe coming into the vortex pit about 2 inches higher than the input on the vortex barrel. Connecting the vortex and the drain barrel together was another problem but I made a temporary connection until I get the 2" PVC flex pipe. I laid out the pump pit and dug it out. I think I will lay concrete blocks in it for now rather than pour a pad. If it floods, I think the water will soak better into the ground and the pit is deeper. Finally, I connected the inlet pipe to the skippy from the vortex pit. It turns out the skippy was not leaking as I thought. After I filled it from the drain barrel, I left the hose in the skippy (under the water) and it must have siphoned back out of the skippy, even though I have a check valve between.

Installed the bottom drain cover with air diffuser and started filling the pond with water. I also decided to pour a concrete pad in the pump pit because I was getting fed up with trying to get everything level on dirt. The pump now sits on a 2" concrete block on top of the concrete pad instead of on a 4" concrete block on dirt. I stopped filling overnight because I needed to adjust folds in the liner as the pond filled.

While the pond was filling, I continued making pump connections and fussing with folds in the liner. I installed the faceplate on the skimmer. I was pretty nervous about having everything at the correct height and kept measuring it as the water creeped up. Jeremy was here for the birthday cookout and took some pictures of the first moments the pump was plugged in. The leaf trap was full of water, but there must have still been some air in one of the lines because the leaf trap emptied out and air bubbles came out of the TPR. I turned off the pump and took off the leaf trap lid and water came rushing back in, so I turned on the pump again and it stayed running without any air. The pump is really quiet. The one end of the pond has good circulation with just the one TPR pointing straight into the pond (I meant to put a 90deg elbow on it to direct it, but didn't have the right part handy). When I get the waterfall going, I think it will have good circulation.

Continued bubble troubleshooting and figured out it has something to do with the leaf trap or connections to it; I removed it and no bubbles. The great bubble saga can be found here: Koiphen.com - Are these bubbles normal?. I also messed around with the edging at the east (towards lawn) and north (patio) edges. Mostly wasted my time moving patio stones around to accommodate such a large amount of liner and then finally decided to cut off the liner at about 24" from the edge. I just had way too much liner to figure out what to do with. I also started laying out some of the skippy waterfall structure.

Decided to cut off the excess liner on the east side, also. Then I dug a trench to hold the remainder liner and smoothed the ground out at that end. That part is done except for the sod, which I will do later rather than killing it by walking to and fro endlessly as I finish the rest of the pond. I worked my way around the rest of the pond digging the edge shelf. I spent most of the day trying to figure out the west waterfall. I laid some 1" concrete blocks on the shelf (had to dig it a bit deeper here) and then picked out some broken concrete pieces to lay on top. I put the pour stone on top; it took several iterations - oh my poor back! - before I had it level. I started removing the concrete fill behind the waterfall so I could put in real concrete blocks.

I'm going to count an extra couple hours of work on some other days in this. Finished carting concrete rubble from west waterfall area down to fill area by compost heaps then scraped down the area where the rubble was to get rid of all the gravel pieces. Got a bunch of plants (Thanks, Darrell!). Got the bottom spillway done for the main waterfall and most of the block structure finished for the rest of it (ran out of blocks and daylight).

I finished setting up the underlying structure of the waterfall and then cut the weir opening in the skippy. The liner in the pond wasn't quite long enough to reach the skippy, so I pulled a second piece of liner up to the skippy and put an accordion fold in it in front of the weir to prevent pulling where it will be attached. I glued the liner to the skippy using Sikaflex adhesive. It would probably be a good idea to use a more mechanical attachment method in addition to the gluing, such as Kent's (Koiphen.com - Pond retro "Charles" pond: post #65 and 66). Then I laid the large cement pieces and filled in a bit with smaller pieces. I chiseled some of the pieces so the visible straight sides would look more like natural stone rather than pieces of sidewalk. It's better to do this before the pieces are in place, but I had to do one after I placed it (used a piece of liner to catch shards, but some still flew out of bounds so had to pick them out of the pond - might have been easier to move to rock and chisel in the grass). Finally, I squirted Great Stuff expanding foam into cracks to prevent water from going behind the rocks and backfilled a bit on both sides of the waterfall with dirt.

I trimmed the foam and painted it. A gray paint might have blended it better, but I tried what I had. I continued checking the pump for leaks by plugging the skimmer and vortex inlets and blowing from a shop vac while I submerged the pump/leaf trap assembly in the vortex (being careful not to actually submerge the pump itself). No air bubbles.. hmmm. So I reconnected the pump and leaf trap, this time with no basket in the leaf trap. I got a few bubbles at first but as the air in the leaf trap dissipated, the bubbles also went away. So I put everything in the skippy and turned it on. Before the waterfall started flowing, I noticed the pond water level was lower than it should have been. I checked again later after putting in more water and, sure enough, I must have a leak somewhere. Maybe I punctured the liner by moving all the heavy concrete pieces. As for the waterfall, it sounds great! The bottom part is not quite finished yet. I also placed rocks on the south side of the pond and backfilled a bit with dirt.

I used a piece of hardboard to pour the concrete patio to overlap the water's edge by an inch or two. It's getting too cold to do much with cement, though (a freeze at night would be bad).

Time to take care of that little leak in the side of the waterfall. I started by taking out a few slabs on that side, cleaning out the mud, and getting it to start drying while I worked on the cover for the vortex pit. The cover turned out to go pretty quickly, when I wasn't dropping my screwdriver, or the washers, or my pencil, or ...etc... down into the bottom of the pit. Intermittent rain. Muddy boots.

It turned out that the underneath-layer of the liner was folded under at the back all along that level of the waterfall. I wasn't sure if it was actually leaking due to being folded down, but it certainly would be better if it was correct. So that meant moving a few more rocks. I also discovered that the place that was leaking wasn't holding water because of the liner not being folded properly. That makes 2 for 2 leaks due to this. After getting the liner corrected, I spent a lot of time trying to get the proper rocks back in. I ended up with a slightly different design than the original layout. Ran out of Great Stuff, so some of this part will let some water through the back (but on top of the liner - just not great for efficiently getting water to flow OVER the waterfall).