Bub's PNW Pond/Stream System Build!

[bubberge]

Because of long-term forecast (every-other-day rain) I felt like I had to put the liner in now vs later, so I went for it. My watch said I burned 5000 calories. It was fully the hardest part of this whole process and possibly one of the hardest physical things I've done as an adult... I really do not love RPE liners. Ugh.

Liner_1: last pic of prep before the underlayment
liner_2: underlayment
liner_3: liner laid out on the driveway and across the pond site.
liner_4: initial lay-in and smashing of the deep part.
liner_5: second lay-in after adjustments. Had to make sure I had a good foot and a half of excess on both reference edges
liner_6: liner tucked in and loosely trimmed. left about 3' of excess on all sides except on the two reference edges

I left 18" of excess outside of the footprint of the pond on the two reference edges, but I ended up trimming off a little bit on the other side. There's about 4' of excess on that side still.

 

[GBBUDD]

Looking good but a couple more food for thought. Imo the. Est fish cave is to dig into one of your shelves for your fish cave as wide and deep as you like. Then you just find a flat rock or two that spans the cave and walk fish cave that's actualy a cave and dint take up pond space.

Also the same principle for Lilly pots dig depressions that are large enough for the pots oil pan buckets so you don't see them sitting on the bottom of the pod shelves (very ugly) imo

 

[GBBUDD]

Whoops I missed you had ics of the liner in but if there excess liner I'd think about caves and Lilly pockets

 

[bubberge]

Well, the rocks are in and the water is running. Haven't tucked any liner or landscaped yet, but it's here. Photos incoming.

 

[bubberge]

In the pre-rock phase, first thing I did was add underlayment and the plastics to the intake bay (pre-rock-0). I have three "pump vaults" submerged: two full-height in the back for the stream and filter pumps, and one half-height in the front for the in-pond jets.

Next pic (pre-rock-1) shows the flexible PVC lines run into the intake bay and the lids for the culverts.

Pic pre-rock-2 shows test-fitting the valves, housing, and piping that I'm using to control flow rates to the main and upper bog filters. In my setup, I use a 1750gph pump for *both* bog filters and I split the flow rate so that the upper gets about 40% and the lower gets the rest. As of now, the upper bog doesn't exist yet but I still need the valves in place. I grabbed a sprinkler cover to bury the controls, and I'm fitting it in this pic.

pre-rock-3 shows the bulkhead fitting I used to pass the pump flow through the liner to the main bog filter. This probably wasn't necessary, but there were a lot of moving parts in this area (buried water and power feeds, plus RPE liner inflexibility) and I wasn't totally certain where my water level would be so I opted for this fitting instead of running the the pipe over the liner edge.

pre-rock-4 is the valve assembly in my garage about to be glued up permanently. I left a bunch of sharpie lines there to remind me which orientation everything needed to be in. pre-rock-5 shows the assembled lines.

pre-rock-6 is the pumps with their chimneys

 

[bubberge]

I have a few more build pics but I'll post a teaser of the falls here. This pic is from the first few minutes after we turned on both the bog (1750gph) and stream (5000gph) pumps together.

The water is muddy, pond water level is off, the foam job was a failure, there's junk everywhere... But in spite of all of that, this was the most satisfying moment.

I feel like a single picture of the falls doesn't really do them justice though, because not all of them are fully visible from the same angle. There are two on the left and one on the right!

 

[bubberge]

I have four large aquablox in the intake bay. I considered filling and running the pond before I had fully covered the aquablox with drain rock, so to keep random debris from getting permanently stuck inside the aquablox, I covered them with window screen material that I had lying around. I do wonder if that will grow algae and inhibit water flow at some point, but I've used the black (and the white) filter fabric in the past without issue and that stuff is 1" or more thick. It's likely that I'll take it off at some point in the future since it doesn't seem strictly necessary, but I don't think it's an imminent problem.