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• 2 Years Later

Making Progress

Once the pond was dug out to the correct dimensions and leveled, it was time to get everything ready.

We purchased a pallet of stones from a large supplier in Thousand Oaks. We had just under two tons of river rock delivered to our house. They dumped it in the front yard and I carted it all to the back. The stones were used to rim the pond and to build the upper basins. We also purchased several large, flat stones for waterfalls. I set out the stones I planned to use to rim the pond before installing the under-liner and liner. Not sure if this was necessary, but I had to put the two tons of rocks somewhere.

After digging the hole, I set the plastic pump housing at the end opposite the mound (at the far end of the picture on right). The pump housing is 34" tall and about 20" across and contains four compartments: a large leaf-catcher just behind the opening to the pond, a compartment for the UV light, a smaller filter (looks like the filter for the heater in my house) at the back end and the pump itself in the middle. The pump is hooked up to a flexible hose which connects to the white pipe you can see in both views to the side of the pond. The kit provided the flexible hose, but I had to buy the white PVC pipe separately. The PVC pipe is connected to the filter housing, another 3' tall, black plastic barrel visible at the far end of the picture on left.

The water is sucked into the pump housing, runs through the leaf-catcher, past the UV light to the smaller filter and then to the pump, which pushes the water down the PVC pipe to the filter housing, which has one large chamber with a lot of filter material inside. This spills out to a flat tray which dumps into the pool at the top of the mound. I also put a 'T' in the PVC pipe and ran a faucet off it, so I could use the pond water to water the plants outside the pond. The pond needs to have replacement of about a third of the water in it a couple of times per year and the water is excellent for plants. This way I can partially empty the pond, hook a hose up to the faucet and direct the water on the plants that need fertilizer. Fish-water makes excellent fertilizer.