My Worst Nightmare!!!

[fishin4cars]

Just a suggestion, is there a way you can hook up a pipe and run behind the liner and see if you can get some of the water from behind the liner. I had that problem on a pond that the run off was coming down against one side. I was able to run a wet vac and 1" pvc behind the liner. Once the water was sucked out I found away to make the run off go around the pond in a different direction. (Added a raised flower bed and mad the water go away from the pond.)

 

[CometKeith]

Mrteach3, Just curious, How far out does your liner go from the pond? I If it doesn't go out far enough and slope down it's easy for water to seep under it and cause your liner to float or bubble.

 

[mrteach3]

fishin, I thought about trying something like that, but with all the rocks I have in and around my pond, there just isn't any way to do it. I think I just have to play the waiting game.

comet, in most places the liner is about 1 1/2 feet over the edge of the pond. Each side is actually mounded to a point which I would have thought would divert the water, but it has to be getting in somewhere. I'll keep looking.

 

[taherrmann4]

During heavy rains with 2" or more in a day I will get water under the liner and it balloons up. Like others have stated put some rocks in the pond strategically placed as to hold the liner down. I did this a year ago with no problems, that was until I came back from vacation and found that it rained sooooo much here in Cincinnati that I did have water ballooning my liner up in places that I did not have rocks. So as I had done several years ago put my "draining the water under the liner plan" in place. I bought a small pump (similar to a sump pump) without a float switch and where you could screw on a hose to it so you could divert the water far away from the pond. This involves taking up some of the rocks on the side so that I can place the pump under the liner only a couple of inches is all that is needed (you don't have to put it in the bottom), hook up the hose plug it in and let it go for about 90 minutes and quite a bit of water was emptied out. So I get up this morining and we had recieved a lot of rain again and did the same for about another 90 minutes and the liner is laying on the bottom again and will just have to keep an eye on it the next several days as they are calling for several more inches of rain.

This is one of my lessons learned that the next time I build a pond or redo this one I will put french drains around the pond to divert the water away.

 

[RSFish1]

I did my clean out of my pond this weekend and drained it. So I did not read this until now. We have had several inches of rain here also. And my yard floods something horrible. I have 250 feet of buried piping moving water to a sump pump pit and it gets overwhelmed.

My liner is always popping up from the pressure of the water running under it. One thing to keep in mind, as the water under the liner dries out, the liner will fall back in to place. The water level in your pond can also fall several inches as this happens. It is not a leak. It is just the settling of the pond. I paniced when this happened and thought I had a leak years ago. Until I realised what was happening.

 

[Sydwall85]

Don't worry too much about this. This happened to my pond last fall just after I had finished it, I too was devastated. We had rained and rained and rained, then we rained some more. I did not notice it until I had about 60 gallons of water under my liner. I searched a lot and found no one knew how to rid the water from under the liner, except to wait for the ground to soak it all back up. Not my style!!!

So I put on my thinking cap and went to work. I removed one rock from the top of my liner at the pond's edge and slipped a 3/8" ID section of rigid tubing between my liner and the underlayment. I tried to finagle it to the deepest spot. Then I attached a 15' piece of flexible tubing to the end of that. I made a small slice in the end of the flexible tubing (the end not near the pond) and placed an air nozzle through the slice and pointed the nozzle towards the open end of tubing and turned on my compressor. The air pressure started a venturi and suctioned the water out from under my liner in just 30 - 40 minutes or so. I ended up leaving the rigid tubing in place and covering it with plants and rocks so I could use it again if I ever had another need.

If you have access to an air compressor, it's worth a try.

 

[fishin4cars]

I had the same thing happen in my pond, and I still have my pipe run along the side of the liner in case it happens again, Only difference was I used a inline pump to pump the water out, I placed a Tee at one end then the pipe going down to the deepest area so that it wouldn't suck up mud directly from the bottom. I then made up a hose connection on the other end, Now when and if I need it I can just attach a reg. water hose to that for sucking the water out. After the fisrt few month's I have not had that issue since, but it's there just in case.

 

[koiguy1969]

i used a $9.00 drill motor pump, and a garden hose to suck out the water when i get some under my liner.

 

[Malak]

I have this issue permanently. as I made the mistake of putting the pond in a low area. I never dreamed that 5000 pounds of water would not be able to stop the liner from bulging. My solution was to place a dedicated pump inside of a tray with holes in it such that the weight of the liner is on the tray, not the pump and the outlet has a short garden hose that comes up out of the edge of the pond and safely dumps the water into the wetlands. We got nearly an inch of rain last night and I had to run the pump for 10 minutes to remove all of the water which is a record time so far. Normally 3-5 minutes morning and night is all it takes. But I am worried about long-term erosion and may have to move the pond eventually.