[Bionic]

Work on my new patio starts on 10th August and I am getting excited.
I would like some sort of water feature i.e. a pond/waterfall/fountain that I can install myself afterwards.
Any recommendations?

[pgkevet]

When i remodeled my surgery and it's gardens I went for easy care which included a lot of paving but a raised area of lawn (for dogs that won't pee on concrete) as well as a place for viewing dogs being trotted around it. At one end i thought a water feature would be cool.. and had the guys build a circular raised pond with a wide enough wall so one could sit comfortably on it. In the middle we installed a three tier fountain with a usual water carrier figure pouring water on the top and the usual pump. Armoured cable under the patio to a junction box on the pond side etc.
I must admit it was pretty cool looking .. spectacular in winter when the icicles formed where the water ran off the tiers .
The only downsides were that it was quite a lot of work to keep it clean and tidy.. and if you sat by it to long then you felt the need to pee

[pgkevet]

Oh, I should add that i built a simpler pond in my last conservatory to keep humidity up for my orchids. That was simple rustic blocks mortared together by myself and a pond liner that was pleated under the coping stones. it was about 6 ft x 4ft inside and we stuck a couple of goldfish and some weed in it. The pump for that had it's own inbuilt fountain upwards.

That was also pretty cool and cheap to do with only two downsides...quite a lot of work cleaning the filter regulalry and you could hear it from the living room when watching telly.. and it made you want to pee (so we turned it off in the evenings)

Here the pond system is part of effluent control through reed beds. There's a serious £400 pump that does some 12000L/hr and pumps that over the top of the septic tank and down 3 drops of a  fountain designed to swirl and aerate before it goes into pond No1. Which is far enough from the house that you can't hear it and it doesn't make you want to pee. BUT the ponds really are hard work to keep clean from weed and debris and overgrown reeds etc - a daily job in the summer. If memory serves that pump can pump a 36ft head .. would be quite a fountain straight up

[devonlady]

I bought a lovely water feature years ago in the shape of a pond with a grown and a child fairy sitting on a water lily leaf, the older fairy pouring water from a shell. I found it soothing and calming but men said "Can you turn it off, it makes me want to pee"

[cloddopper]

The simple sunken tub set in dry mixed mortar that's been watered in and left for a few weeks to stop it collapsing is good  for when you buy the tub  at garden centres you also buy the heavy duty heavy galvanized grid that you put over the tub . then all you need is to buy the ornament , a pump 7 several bags of roundish stones starting at 50 mm and maxing at say 100 mm plus a few massive  lumps that make it different from the run of the mill gardenset up.

 Some ornaments have an internal ring of led lights that are white , blue or a rainbow combination changed by a sequencer . to power it up you'll need an RCD protected plug inside your nearest room  so you can run a cable out to os where you can plug or wire in the pump & light a water proof box.. each circuit has to have it's own socket /terminal group don't put both items wired into a single plug for safety's sake .

 We purchased a hand carved pink granite thing that looks like two 700 mm high slugs making  love . Imagine a hollow heart shape entwined at the top with the blue lit water up in the bottom of the heart and cascading out over the edges to run onto the stones & then fall back in to the sump stones fountain springing  .ca 3 300 the tub and grid £60 five 30 kg bags of clean washed roundish stones as previously stated ca £ 60    pump £30  ,ice blue ring light £17 , the plug in RCD from Aldi £11 , a waterproof box with a two gang switched double pole sockets specially seal-able for pond electrics ca £ 25  & finally each plugged in device is plugged into a simple mechanical timer so they are only on during the hours we want it to run or/& be lit up .

 I've spent nearly an hour looking through my pictures files and realise I don't have a picture of it .....neither in the day nor the night .

[Bionic]

Hmmm, hard to imagine 2 pink slugs making love  but I think I get the idea.


I am just trying to work out the electrics before the builder puts the patio down

[cloddopper]

Here you are  especially for you ..
The area will be getting a pressure wash down , once I've finished shredding /chipping for composting some 60 foots worth of " bloody annoying next doors"  hedge"  that intrudes over my garden if left unattended , by way of me chipping up four feet long Leylandi branches & various other length clippings .
I'm now on my 8 th full container of the chipping exercise .( two more to go ?)

 The electrics ..
Before the builders got going I purchased and buried at 600 mm cm deep using  hazard indicating /marking tape over the top of the pipes (  right up to the features edge ) two black plastic 15 mm self supporting pond water pipes .
Each being some 4 mtrs long . I've done it like this so that in years future when the light or pump fails I can easily draw in new cable rather than have to dig things out .
 I terminated the pair of pipes at the reservoir end in a hollowed out block of polystyrene so that they wouldn't become encased or filled with the dry lean cement mix that went under and round the tub.  The other end is terminated under an inverted  cut down piece of angles square rain down pipe that has a wall clip fitted to secure it to the wall .
It sounds difficult to imagine but ends up as a sloping water proof cover to shield the holes 7 open pipe ends at the wall from rain ingress where the cables pass into the garage.
( I can take a piccie if you want one ).

 The officially supplied sump is far better than buying a cheap 40 litre hard plastic garden / feed bucket , for if it is like mine there is a recess  in/down  the side where you slip the water pump in  this leaves the whole of the base of the reservoir devoid of obstructions so that after four or so years when mother nature in her wisdom has started to cause the bottom to silt up the pump is not sucking in gunge and you can slip an aqua vac pipe down into the sump after removing a few stones on the grid cover and suck out all the water . Do that and refill it several times and the reservoir is good for another four or so years.
 
 The pipes came from the local garden centre that has an aquatic section.

 I chose to have the heavy duty galv grid  because the PO of the property here had used a 3 inch gauge non galv 6 mm thick wire weld mesh & set the edges in concrete for his water feature .
Needless to say it had rusted through and the whole 150 kg structure had fallen into his deep home made cut down 310 litre plastic barrel sump & severed the power cable to the pump .  He'd left it there like that when we purchased the place as it would have taken a great amount of time & effort to sort it out.

 Oh...  our slugs are about 110 kg & needed a fit used to lifting two man lift,  using a 4 inch round wooden pole through the middle and some rope to hold it from slipping .
 I got them to use my wooden pole rather than a scaffold tube so as to not damage the sculpture . They carried it jungle book style , slung under the pole for some 50 mtrs from where the lorry crane had placed it .

 With hindsight one thing I should have done and may do in the future , is to take all the stones off the grid and get some neoprene pond liner to make a  massive washer that will just  fit over the sculpture and  reach well beyond the edges of the  grid . Lift the edges using dry sand and cement to make a saucer shape so that the vast majority of the pumped water easily runs back in to the reservoir .
For every now & then when the wind is in a certain direction at a fair blow the overspill is blown  off the stones and does not manage to run back in to the reservoir ... instead it runs over some of the larger stones & off into the gravel .
Then when i hear that echo of the falling water i have to refill the feature with fresh water .

I used to have the fresh rain water run off the green house guttering  piped into the reservoir as a mother natures own top up system  but found that the sediment in the reservoir developed at an alarming rate . So much that I was having to vacuum  the soft sludge out every eight or nine weeks & give it a final fresh water refill once I was happy it was clean .


My bigger  stones  :-
  Are courtesy of mother nature and were delivered right from my garden by me one deep excavating & landscaping fortnight .

I discovered that similr sized ones  were priced in the local garden centres at £ 30 to £80 each & that was nearly five years ago, god only knows what they'd want for them this year. 

[Bionic]

Big stones are something I'm not short of. I could build a house with what we have here.
Thanks for all the other info though. I need to digest it and gently break it to OH 
I like the pink slugs too. I have a similar sculpture, on a very small scale that I did myself a while back.
Hmmm, perhaps I should get a big bit of stone and do some more carving.

[devonlady]

Bionic, you are full of surprises!