History of the Pond

Part I (Ages ago)

Running Water

For as long as I can remember, Dad has talked about having a pond or fountain in our yard somewhere, but we never really knew how to do it. My first summer back from college, we decided to try to build a water feature on the indoor/outdoor patio. We found a small pump and three 1/2 barrels that we used to make a three-tiered falls that ended in a tiny pond at the bottom.

All of this was built on top of a cement patio, so digging was not an option. We built a small retaining wall with rocks, and brought in dirt to fill it. We stacked the barrels and built the pool at the bottom with cement. We then added plants and lights. On the seventh day we rested.

Lessons Learned

It was really cool to have running water and it looked great, but as I have learned in the years to come, we did a lot wrong on that first attempt. What did we do wrong? It would be easier to answer what we did right, but I will try to answer the first question.

• Concrete - Poor choice of material. It leaked badly because we had not heard of concrete sealer. It also probably leached into the water, but since we didn't have plants and the fish were extremely hardy, we never noticed. At that time, we had never heard of EPDM liner, and there was no such thing as a pond supply store in our area.
• Dirty Barrels - The barrels we used were old wine aging barrels and still had lots of residue from their past life. If we had really had anything other than some tiny goldfish, it probably would have been a problem.
• No GFI - I'm probably lucky to be alive. The circuit we ran the pump and lights off of was not GFI protected. When the house was built, I'm not sure GFI even existed. Don't make this mistake!
• Too shallow - The concrete pool was at most six inches deep. The temperature changes those poor fish endured must have been incredible.
• Auto Refill Nightmare - because we lost so much water to evaparation and leakage, I build a system to automatically refill. I used a toilet float and fed water to it from the other side of the house with a hose over the roof. It work OK until the first winter. The hose froze and split, and when it thawed, it flooded the flat roof over the garage and made quite a mess. That was the end of the auto refill!
• Time - Eventually the metal bands on the barrels rusted through and one of the barrels just fell apart.