We have not found many glitchs with the Savio brand pond kit. Everything has worked as advertised: it’s virtually maintenance free, never has to be drained, is very, very clear to the bottom (brown-tinted, but clear)—and does not make a lot of machinery-racket or cost a mint to run.
BUT—there was the famous incident of the waterfall expansion foam. The purple sparkly waterfall foam. Never, ever, ever use that stuff if you can possibly avoid it. Just stack the rocks cleverly. Point number one, it poofs out in huge purple boils (we took it all off) and point number 2, it is not waterproof. It leaks like a sieve from all the bubbles in it.
And the other BUT—the gasket in the waterfall weir. All the illos show people merrily piling rock onto the spillway of the waterfall, and if you do that, it will leak like crazy down where you can’t see it. After taking apart and re-stacking both wings of the waterfall rockwork, I came to this conclusion, went down and bought a 3.oo tube of aquarium (water ok, safe for fish and people) silicon glue and ran a bead along the seam for this flimsy little gasket that is supposed to seal it.
Oh, yes. Today we have only 30-50 gallons of evaporation, what I would expect from that water surface and a frothy waterfall, and not the 200 gallon a day supplement I have had to make, complete with dechlorination liquid and buffer and such. Our plants near the waterfall may take a bit more watering now, but at least it won’t be laboriously prepared fish water, and it also means maintenance of the water level is a lot easier! 200 gallons down and the pump can’t do its job properly, a risk to an expensive pump, not to mention filtration not working correctly.
Snoopy dance! Now we just have to build back the rockwork atop the filter, piece of cake.
Woohoo!
I salute the both of you and perform the Snoopy dance in sympathetic chorus (even though the moves may not be very Greek). Having frequently re-arranged the stones bordering/overlapping the very small waterfalls/pool basins of my tiny water garden (3 18″ spillways and one separate bamboo fountain flowing into a 2′ by 4′ pond), I know what all that lifting, peering and replacing does to the back. My current arrangements of stone and water angles seems to have a small leak too, but I am just loosing 2-3 gallons a day and so don’t mind quite as much.
Also, it is raining again in Boston!!!!! Aaargh. New England is quite sick of rain at this point, although we finally had some lovely days over the weekend: it quite felt like summer then, but now it feels like, well, like a slugs’ soggy paradise and that is not what I set up either my water or my flower/vegetable gardens to be.
Pardon the rant: I like cool weather and a well-watered garden, but I wanted to sit out in my garden tonight after work and not, instead, dodge raindrops flicking slugs off the remaining peas, lettuce and, oddly, many, many milkweed florets.
😆 I understand. We have now entered the fire season, when the piney woods are too dry, a passing storm contributes only lightning and no water that reaches the ground, and when the smoke of forest fires snakes its way down river valleys to color the sunsets and mess up the breathing of us allergy sufferers. We will reach 103 by Monday, and then, hopefully, the Week of Heat will give way maybe to a rain or something a little less brutal. Our week of misery is usually about a week, two weeks, and then the temperature moderates. But another nice thing—our night-time temperatures are about 60 degrees at 20% humidity, which is a lot better than 80 degree nighttime lows and 40 percent humidity, which is what I grew up with, pre-airconditioning. Even as bad as it is now, if you stand in the shade near the pond, the ambient is not at all bad. The pond is sunk between tall fences and 2 buildings, so it conditions the air all around it.
And you aren’t kidding about the rock-lifting while adjusting waterfalls. You have to stand like a giraffe taking a drink, hoist a rock while bent over, taking care not to let your foot slip and shove rocks into the pond, and there you stand, trying to figure where the spray could be exceeding the bounds of the pondliner.
Whoopee!! It will help your water bill, too!
And now I have a line of equipment to investigate, thank you! Our little pond, installed by the previous owners of our house, is one missed opportunity after another – most notably a small downhill slope that would allow for a bit of a waterfall – so it is fairly high on the “redo this someday” list.
That downhill slope, if you dug into it, could provide both a waterfall and a small stream down to your pond. The best equipment going is Savio. I’ve not had a bit of trouble with it except that one glitch: the designs are good, easy to service. In a small pond you won’t likely need a skimmer, just a small waterfall filter…mine is the large economy size. I dealt with http://www.pondliner.com and have nothing but good to say about them.
oh gosh, I am trying to figure out how much is evaporation in 40 degrees heat and how much could be a leak ..on 140 square metres of swimming pond in Spain .., I am told to expect 1cm evap a day or more, and we are adding about 3 bathtub fulls a day, and its still going down …
I don’t know your humidity, but that translates to 104 F, which is high. I can tell you my pond is 4000 gallons, and a simple bead of glue inside the filter’s joint to the outflow has reduced the water demand from 200 gallons with 20% ambient humidity and at 95 degrees F (5″ on our measuring rock) every 1-3 days, to the loss of about 1″ over two days at 20% and 95 degrees. Check your joints, first of all, and look for damp spots. Joint leaks are real common, can lose an amazing amount, and are very easy to fix.
purplejulian, Wow,140 square meters is a big pond!! It could be at least partly evaporation. Multiply 140 square meters by 1 cm depth and you get 1.4 cubic meters, about 49.5 cubic feet, expected to evaporate. A typical US bathtub holds about 12 cubic feet (almost 90 gallons) when nearly full, which is about 0.34 cubic meters, so if your tub is the same, the 3 tubs you are adding might come to about 1.0 cubic meters of water total, which is less than the 1.4 cubic meters expected to evaporate. Also, that much water weighs almost 338 kg (745 lbs), so if you are carrying your tub to the pond, you are probably adding even less water.
its set up to fill for 30 minutes twice a day, from the house water tank, which is fed by a borehole. certainly not carrying it!!! its a swimming pond, and the guy who built it said he couldn’t help it being so big, but its certainly bigger than planned,
I worked it out in litres, as they translate straight from cubic metres, and means 1 cm loss is 140 litres which is about half a bathtub. say its twice that because of
extraordinary heat, thats 280, a whole bathtub.
I think that there is much more going in than that, as it was emptying
the tanks under the porch in half an hour, although its difficult to
estimate because the tanks don’t always fill up completely. I don’t
have the cc for the tanks, but they would make rather big bath tubs!
also it lost 1cm overnight, that’s not evaporation, surely! I’m not there, so I am dependent on information from the people who are managing the letting for me.
Let’s see: mine is 4000 US gallons, about 15,000 litres. Proper Evaporation, without a leak is about 50 gallons or about 180 liters every 2 days.
First thing you’ve got to establish is how much you’re actually putting in. If you have a really big container of a known size, you can figure it if you cut off the automatic flow. I used a trash can and the garden hose at full throttle, which will fill 32 gallons in a few minutes. Multiplication told me my edge of running dry in the skimmer fills are about 30 minutes, at the same water pressure with the same hose.
I just got corrected, 1cm over 140 msq is 1400 litres, or 1.4 m cubed. thats got to be at least 4 bath-tubs full. no wonder there is lots of water going in and the level is still going down!
Ow. You’ve got a leak. Have you got a bottom drain, or is there another mechanism? Mine drains from the waterfall filter, if needed. The first place to suspect is not a compromise in the lining, but in a pipe or hose or valve joint, or, as with mine, an inflow. A bottom drain is at once the most suspicious site for a problem. Check your outflow and make sure it’s dry. Then start checking hose fittings. Follow the water flow, and be sure each stage is sealed.
no, not a leak, but 1cm evaporation = 1400 litres!!!!! eeeek … hard to keep supplying that much water from my borehole …
there is no bottom drain, all the pipery is inside the pond and sleeved outside for the skimmers and circulation at the top level of the pool.
I have not finished paying for this huge pool (not that I wanted such a big one, but he reckoned he couldn’t help it)so I have some leverage if there is a leak – we already had 2 leaks in the piping.
Purplejulian, I can’t find the thread where you first described this pool. Yours is the one I’m thinking of, right, that has water plants at the sides and a clear area in the center? It occurs to me that there may be less evaporation, the more surface you can get covered with waterlilies, if you have those. That’s if you can keep them from spreading into your swimming area! Then any inflated float pads you may have, floating on the surface in the hot afternoons, would also help some.
Mainly I guess you have to hope it gets cooler. 40° – Yikes! It was that hot here today, but we always hope those spells won’t last. We have a cloudy, relatively cool week coming, supposed to be in the low 90s (33-34°C). But then there was the famous summer of 1980, where there were around 60 days of 100°F+, including every day of July. I cleverly managed to be in grad school in New York then, fortunately.
I think its going to be a constant max of between 30 and 36 (gets to 40 as far as one’s car thermometer is concerned) through August and maybe some of september too. its a terrible summer in southern europe, there are forest fires all over the place already. 4 firefighters lost their lives in Catalonia this week. we don’t have pine trees in Extremadura, but once those ilex oaks start burning you can’t put them out.
140 msq? that is a big pond –like 10 m by 14 m? or 33 feet by 46 feet? A centimeter of evaporation at that kind of summer temperature sounds quite reasonable, though it does seen to work out to a scary number of liters. If you have trees and shrubls for a windbreak, though, you can take comfort in the thought that a lot of it is staying around as enhanced humidity in your garden.
The concept af a biologically healthy swimming pool supporting water plants is wonderful to me. Here we have ponds and creeks, supporting life, and sterile clear blue-painted highly chlorinated swimming pools, which do NOT, and never the twain shall meet.
You come in to DFW airport, and as you get lower you see all the little sterile aquamarines, set in their little almost-identical settings. Some of them even have a tree nearby – Heavens! leaves in the skimmer! http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/3/10/871458/pools.jpg
Sorry. That’s my rant for the day. And it’s probably partly envy anyway. Purplejulian, I want YOUR pool.
ah, that is lovely to hear, I am finding a certain amount of prejudice against my pool – comments like “I am scared of something touching me in the water” , and people thinking the water is dirty or contaminated … there is a lot of sludge on the bottom, because its the first year, and the system has been all over the place, is still not working fully because the plants are not really established yet.
I hope that as the waterlilies spread over the non-swimming part of the pool they will prevent some of the evaporation.
you can see pictures of it in my blog, here – http://janewheeler.co.uk/blog/category/spain/
I think we were writing posts at the same time – obviously you’re working on the lilies. The pond and the olives on the hill are GORGEOUS! I’m so jealous!
Your indoor climate control is just like mine. I have a big exhaust fan that I turn on around midnight (takes that long, in the middle of town, for it to cool down outside — too much concrete, too many air conditioners pumping out hot air 24/7) The cool air is pulled in until around 8 am, when I turn off the fan, and close the doors and windows. Then a couple of little fans in the rooms where I am keep it OK most of the day.
I do have air conditioning, which I may turn on for 2-4 hours in the afternoon. If the temp stays to the low 90s I never turn it on. Meanwhile I hear my tenants upstairs with their AC on 24 hours, even on the cooler nights when it gets down into the upper 60s (20°C). Ask me how my electric bill compares with theirs! (Of course, since their AC keeps my ceiling cool, I am getting a little bit of a free ride from them.)
I can’t afford AC or fans, because I have only photovoltaic power, and this is a big issue with the pond too. in fact I badly need separate panels for my pond, otherwise it sucks the batteries dry on a cloudy day. luckily there aren’t too many of them at the moment.
I think US AC turned down to 60 degrees (oh and of course all the UK businesses that have AC, we don’t really have it in homes) is going to be a huge issue with climate control. glad to hear you are eco! or perhaps the US will become one huge solar electricity field and wind farm in the end when oil runs out …. 🙂 of course I know the North west is much more blameless in this with their hydro plants 🙂
You know, the plants themselves may draw a certain amount: they’re going to respire like mad in high heat. If I count how much water I throw on my plants daily, I’d keep up with you.
oh yes, there’s that to factor in too …