Bricks as pond edging (in pond)

[HTH]

A formal pond is a somewhat harder to do then a natural one where a rock can move and it looks just as good as where you set it. Providing it has not jumped into the pond for a swim.

This thread may seem a little confusing because we talked about the same issues in another thread. May have been Right Way to Edge a Pond. I am thinking the OP was there and if not then opps

I have already stated 'either here or there' that the design illustrated in post #8 shifted and that it only takes a slight misalignment for the paver to look bad. I also said the next time I do a formal pond the caps or pavers an going to be sitting on top a cast or block pond wall.

I am not screaming stop, don't do it you will be sorry for several reasons. First some people just have to do it their way and learn from their mistakes, their choice.. Second it is a smallish pond and I expect he will be enlarging or changing it in some way not too far down the road. Lastly I don;t know everything and once in a while something I have taken for granted for years is shown to be wrong or obsolete.


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[Waterbug]

Maybe Arizona does not stay below freezing long enough for the concrete to freeze. Its not enough to have ice on the surface the brick has to freeze inside.

I understand that most people only believe or learn from living thru something, but it is possible to learn other ways. However, I did live for about 30 years in Upstate NY, kept ponds, did construction. I remember one period of about 3 weeks where the temp didn't get above 10F and was -45F at night...and that's not windchill. So I do have at least a basic idea what freezing is and how concrete and mortar react.

Water expands when it freezes by about 10% in volume . It busts up a saturated concrete brick because the brick can't expand. Many of the saturated bricks on the north wall of the pond I pictured above were busted up from freezing. Not a myth.

That water expands about 10% is a proven fact. Using that fact to say concrete/mortar breaks way frozen is the myth. It's pretty easy to demonstrate since a huge part of the world is in freezing climate and use concrete/mortar kind of a lot. When I lived in NY for example we had a high water table and in winter most of the land was flooded. Every house and barn had a poured concrete, mortared rock or dry stacked foundation going down a minimum of 4'. So these structures were fully saturated in water. Normal freeze depth was about 3'. So thousands of builds with fully submerged concrete and mortared rock put thru countless freeze thaw cycles. The house I lived in, and the barn, were built in 1911. Still solid.

You can blame freezing, no problem. My guess, I mean if I was betting cash, maybe you mixed the mortar too dry or too wet? Maybe you didn't condition the bricks first? Maybe it was too hot when the job was done? Maybe the wrong type of mortar was used? I have no idea, I'd just be playing the percentages for DIY jobs.

The design would not be my first choice but it seems Blue Orca wants to give it a try. Sometimes people just have to learn from their mistakes. I posted the image to give him his best chance at making it work.

I agree 100%. I was just adding info.

 

[Waterbug]

Frost is powerful, and when a Canadian frost can get several feet deep it is not to be under estimated, that is why fence posts are dug to a minimum of 4 feet depth, otherwise they will heave.

Ground heave is the biggest danger by far. I think if people focused more on the actual problems and less on myths this all would be a lot easier and people would get better results. It's a difficult enough process without myths.

 

[HTH]

@ waterbug. I dry stacked the cement bricks and pavers. I knew there was going to be some movement and wanted the ability to adjust for it.

Lets see if we can find any data to back up either point of view.

Lets start here

this bridge is given as an example in the above

there are very specific conditions required

Deterioration of concrete from freeze thaw actions may occur when the concrete is critically saturated, which is when approximately 91% of its pores are filled with water. When water freezes to ice it occupies 9% more volume than that of water. If there is no space for this volume expansion in a porous, water containing material like concrete, freezing may cause distress in the concrete. Distress to critically saturated concrete from freezing and thawing will commence with the first freeze-thaw cycle and will continue throughout successive winter seasons resulting in repeated loss of concrete surface.

By the end of winter I had bricks that were not cracked but crumbled into rubble. Mostly on the north side of the hoophouse. This was a covered pond. Only the bricks that rested partly below the water line were effected.

 

[Waterbug]

What are you trying to convince me of? That out of millions of cases of concrete use in wet and freezing conditions that a tiny percentage can suffer damage due to poor building practices? Because I agree, 100%.

That picture looks a lot like the concrete foundation of a house I own here in Phoenix, very bad spalling. In NY everyone would say it was caused from freezing. Well, doesn't really freeze here, and kind of bone dry. The more likely reason...it was poured when it was too hot and was not protected properly. But there's a few dozen other possible reasons.

 

[Mucky_Waters]

HTH I read the linked article you posted, but I've been doing some reading on this subject lately myself. I don't profess to know all the answers (yet), but this pdf article about salt and water's damaging effect on concrete disagrees with one point your article brings out, and that has to do with air-entrainment of the concrete. The article you posted states that "To protect concrete from freeze/thaw damage, it should be air-entrained by adding a surface active agent to the concrete mixture." I have found quite the opposite to be true, for the reasons brought out in the article I just posted.
I do know a little bit about air-entraining cement mixes, I am a stucco contractor by trade, and we use air-entraining techniques when we mix our cement based stucco mixes, to do this you can use a variety of products, but the simplest and cheapest is simply to add a dash of dish soap. We do this to make the stucco more workable, but it also makes it weaker, so you have to be careful not to overdo it.
Anyway, I thought you might want to read that link I posted, as it offers quite the opposite view on the effect of air-entrainment and freeze thaw cycles.
From my experience it seems air-entraining concrete makes makes the resultant mix more susceptible to damage from freeze thaw cycles.

 

[HTH]

MW's article states

On freezing, water
expands about 10% and, if
restrained, creates stresses
that no concrete can withstand.

Goes on to say

. Purposely entrained air bubbles act as
reservoirs for excess water
forced into them by
progressing ice fronts in
capillaries. Quality concrete
air entrainment effectively
prevents frost damage. !

That agrees with

To protect concrete from freeze/thaw damage, it should be air-entrained by adding a surface active agent to the concrete mixture

There is something to consider here.
If there is air ahead of the freezing water the entrapped air will provide room for the expansion.
If there is not there is not protection, there is more water which should make it worse.

WB

What are you trying to convince me of? That out of millions of cases of concrete use in wet and freezing conditions that a tiny percentage can suffer damage due to poor building practices? Because I agree, 100%

You have been saying it can not happen in a pond. I say it can. At least you are now saying that in general it can happen.

 

[Mucky_Waters]

MW's article states




Goes on to say
That agrees with


There is something to consider here.
If there is air ahead of the freezing water the entrapped air will provide room for the expansion.
If there is not there is not protection, there is more water which should make it worse.

HTH Thanks for reading that article closer than I did.
You are correct the two articles agree, I missed that. That's what happens when I only get 5 minutes in the morning to spend on the internet. lol
My searching was mostly about the effects of salt on concrete, but air-entraining seems to be directly related to this issue.
I still stand by the fact that air-entraining does physically weaken concrete, especially if it is over done, but it appears that even if it is weaker it better protected from freeze thaw damage. That explains something I have noticed with some home paving stones we made, when I get time I'll post some pictures.

 

[Waterbug]

WB
You have been saying it can not happen in a pond. I say it can. At least you are now saying that in general it can happen.

Yes, I have to assume that out of the billions of concrete applications in the world over the past centuries that there has been cases of "partially submerged concrete bricks crumbling due to freeze thaw cycles". I wouldn't be able to prove it of course. But statistically I'd assume it isn't 0.

Statistically the odds of any DIY person inexperienced in masonry building something that crumbled due to pretty much anything is much higher. Statistically the odds of that person also being able to tell if the damaged was caused by freezing is close to zero. Even an expert mason might have a hard time saying if the crumbling was caused by poor mixing, poor application, poor curing or even freezing. Playing the odds, freezing isn't going to be in the running.

Deterioration of mortar over 10,20,30 years from freezing, and far worst, contact with low pH water, yeah sure. Deterioration of concrete/mortar to the point of actually crumbling after 1 year, or even a couple of years, from anything other than a jackhammer IMO can only mean it was an improper application and not that concrete/mortar crumbles because of freezing...because it doesn't when done even half way right.

But I know I'm peeing into the wind. I get that 99% of of readers will certainly believe concrete disintegrates when it freezes and concrete in a pond kills fish, and on and on and on. I get it's super easy and fun to scare newbies away from using concrete. So why do I debate the point? I have no idea beyond too much time on my hands. Certainly a fool's errand.

Good day.

 

[HTH]

The thing is I had an entire row of partially submerged brick reduced to rubble. The pond was in a greenhouse so I expect that it went through a freeze thaw cycle daily all winter.

The reason you had trouble with me is that you stated something as black and white that is grey.

I have run into people that think concrete in any form is bad. I use concrete blocks in my ponds all the time. Just not fresh from the factory.

 

[Waterbug]

The reason you had trouble with me is that you stated something as black and white that is grey.

Not really any trouble. I post here when I take a break from programming because when I play "a few games of Freecell" it turns into many games of Freecell. So if I don't enjoy a thread I don't post.

I'm under no delusion that anyone is ever going to be convinced of anything in any online forum. That's not my purpose, my job or any of my business to convince people of anything. I've been fascinated by how the human mind works hs been part of my software programming for several years. That humans can be shown and demonstrated something simple and completely obvious but they will stick with some completely made up myth for no apparent reason. That a person would be handed a myth to by another person(s) and that myth will be held so very dear, held so tightly and the lied to person will actually defend the person(s) who told them the myth rather than ever accepting the myth to be a myth. It could just be called pride, but that's too simple, just a label. I assume "pride" is very important. Without it we would always be changing our minds, so at some level it's a good thing.

Here, talking about ponds, this myth stuff really doesn't matter at all, it's harmless. No one cares if some DIYer wants to mortar a few bricks together and believe whatever myth they want. Have fun. The project probably isn't going to last for multiple reasons so what's the point of even thinking about freezing.

But this type of thought process, or lack, is a huge deal in other human areas. Does a President go to war because of some myths? How can the thought process be changed to detect myths and change out comes? Could there ever be a software program that could help a person change their thinking? A computer can't just provide the "right" as if there ever is a "right" answer, but can a computer actually help a person become more cognitive?

If we're ever going to make a computer think like humans we really have to understand the totality of how the human brain works. That is fascinating to me and I think solvable at least to some degree in my life time.

So no worries on the "trouble". No trouble at all, I learned a lot. Thanks.

 

[HTH]

Good post.

On the computer thing. I hope you are right. I specialized in AI during my university days, expert systems. We have for the most part solved the easy computing problems. The ones that are left are much harder. For the most part we can do a computer that has human like performance within a narrow field but it can only work well in the context of that field. But the gold ring is a self aware computer. I fear that is at best some decades away.

Would love to be wrong.

Computing is sort of funny. In the past the theory guys come up with stuff and then it sits on the shelf until we have enough computing power to make it work or even give it a decent try.

I wonder if we have gotten past that or if we are still waiting on more power. Neural nets come to mind but I am not at all sure as they were making them on chips but I have no idea the current density or what success they are having with massive nets.

 

[HARO]

. Does a President go to war because of some myths?

You mean like Weapons of Mass Destruction?
John

 

[Waterbug]

You mean like Weapons of Mass Destruction?

You betcha. But there's lots of examples. Robert McNamara gave a lot of examples in The Fog of War. Like when after the Vietnam War met with Vietnam leaders to find out how it all went down and found out both parties had very little understanding of each other and that probably was the main cause of that war. And LBJ's reasoning was that great.

By "I think solvable at least to some degree in my life time" I mean just the basic construct of how we now think neurons work. A simple thing like a "color" input and have an opinion be formulated. I'd like to see that in my lifetime. Really hard, but I think possible. Doesn't have to be real time initially. Trouble is it's really scary for people in computer science because it's almost the opposite of current practices. We always have complete and absolute control over how a program executes and to invent a construct that gives that up is not how we think. How do you develop an algorithm where you have no idea of the outcome? We're trained to think the other direction. Here's the outcome, how do we get there type thinking.

AI has always needed a lot of horsepower because of how the problem is approached. Like a chess program will search millions of possible moves basically sequentially (even if divided between lots of CPUs) is basically raw computer power. Seems the brain works way different. Where AI has been linear I think access in the brain is more exponential so in theory the computer power may not be as great. A lot to be sure, but no where near what AI seems to require. It's almost a Catch-22. Neurons are pretty simple really. How they work together is the bugger. That shouldn't take CPU power, just a similar algorithm.

I hope anyways.

 

[HTH]

I am going to try to answer some of your questions and explain a few things because I was in theory trained in this field.

The field of Artificial Intelligence is exactly about solving the hard and scary problems. Researchers in AI have solved many problems that people now take for granted like speech recognition and robot vision systems. Once AI people crack a problem the dump it into the greater world of computing and most people forget who figured it out. Much of what we now take for granted was pioneered by AI.

Nural networks were first proposed in 1949 and research followed until the existing limitations on speed and memory shut it down. When I was in graduate school there was a resurgence in the field. Much progress was made but they seemed to have hit another barrier. I do not know if was processing power of some nut that needed cracking.

It looks like using a NN to determine color has already been done. In 1998 the abstract of one paper writes

This paper outlines the beginning of the development of a colour measurement system which is portable, easy to use, and more accurate than other portable devices by virtue of an artificial neural network used to analyze the data. With specialized training of the neural network, it could even be used in applications such as teeth and skin colour measurements.

More up to date web info has hobby types using NN's to determine if something is not a color. One might also look at fuzzy logic which would let us talk about something being other then blue or not blue. More like a little blue and a lot red. I have not done a lot with fuzzy logic.

You asked How do you develop an algorithm where you have no idea of the outcome?
There is another area of programming that most people have not been exposed to. It is called data driven programming.
FRL, Frame Representation Language, is data driven. A 'program' is a set of frames. Each frame can be used to describe and manage something. Each frame contains data and code expressed as triggers. The engine that drives the program sifts through the frames using the trigger code to see if something needs to be done. In an ideal world we would have one processor per frame.

There is no expectation of linear program flow. Interaction between frames can generate, hopefully positive, results to manage unforeseen conditions. It really gets interesting when the frames are allowed to generate new frames. That is self modifying, or computer generated program extension of existing code.

FRL is written as a LISP interpreter by a smart dude named Marvin Minsky who also created the first neural network simulator. He is as close as I get to having a personal hero. I baaed my thesis work on FRL. I wrote a PC based version of FRL that generated C source which was then compiled. A slow 8 MHz running my version blew the doors off a VAX11/780 running the FRL version of the same code. It was fun.

Anyway I think as we move ahead a few orders of magnitude on massively parallel machines and denser NN chips we should see the sort of progress you are looking for.