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.