Distance from pond to filter? Clear polyurea?

[alex chappelear]

if space is limited and I don't want to see or hear equipment, how far can I situate a seive, sediment tank, external pump from the pond. I have a place about 70 feet away that I could hide everything that is at the same level of the pond site. Didn't know if there was a limit on a gravity flow system as long as water is traveling horizontally instead of uphill.

Do all surfaces turn black, any reason for rocks on bottom of pond s clear polyurea if everything will be covered with dark algae

 

[Waterbug]

Sieve is pretty quiet, most of it is below ground and they can be covered. Sediment tank is dead quiet or it won't be working otherwise. External pumps vary alot, most have dB ratings. Also depends on the person. I don't like to hear a pump but I've seen other post here that they can be right on top of an external and not hear it....so depends on how good your hearing is. Distance would have less to do with sound traveling than barriers.

The limit on gravity flow has to do with pipe size, number and types of turns and pump flow rate. There are calculations that can be done that aren't too hard to do. 70' is far. I'd be thinking more about sound proofing than distance. And yes, horizontal is fine...BUT, the pipe can't go up and down, can't be high spots. They can trap air, even after flushed, and restrict flow a great deal. And a single length of pipe will hump if the bed it sets on humps. So 70' would require serious attention to detail.

Underwater rocks can turn black from bacteria when covered in muck for a long period. Black goes away after awhile when cleaned.

Reason for rocks is mainly aesthetics. They can protect the liner if installed correctly. That they do any bio filtering to me is a myth, advertising hype. Yeah they do, but so little to not be worth considering.

couldn't parse the polyurea text

 

[Usman]

how about if u keep the settlement chamber near pond but keep the pump far away ? theoretically chamber faraway should work too but we never know what can be problems later on as i have seen settlement chamber really close to pond always even tho they place filters , pumps far away , can be issue of blocking increase in density inside or lesser pressure by the time who knows until some one try . if you can create strong waterfall sound , that can block pump sound too , i have aerator out side which produces lil sound but if water fall is running , i cant hear it .

IMO Rocks at extreme bottom will turn dark and merge into liner , wud hardly see its beauty, will create more problems then good , they can trap waste and harder to clean pond . they do better at middle or upper level where there is stronger waterflow or at shady places they remain clearner from algae

 

[addy1]

I have a dragon lim pond pump unless you are standing right next to it, you can not hear it running. Mine is external.
It pumps around 6800 gph. I have been running it, between my arizona pond and here, around 16 years.

 

[Waterbug]

how about if u keep the settlement chamber near pond but keep the pump far away ? theoretically chamber faraway should work too but we never know what can be problems later on as i have seen settlement chamber really close to pond always even tho they place filters , pumps far away , can be issue of blocking increase in density inside or lesser pressure by the time who knows until some one try .

Settlement chamber can be anywhere. Didn't understand the pressure stuff. You mean like friction loss in a long pipe run? Yes, but pipe can be sized correct to eliminate that problem.

Normally these days in Water Garden the pond itself is used as a settlement chamber. External chambers, even vortex, fell out of favor years ago. They really don't work very well. Not saying you shouldn't, just wondering if you got some bad advice. There's plenty of that.

if you can create strong waterfall sound , that can block pump sound too , i have aerator out side which produces lil sound but if water fall is running , i cant hear it .

Absolutely. Just depends on the pump, where it is, sound proofing like a pump house, the falls sound and how good a person's hearing is.

IMO Rocks at extreme bottom will turn dark and merge into liner , wud hardly see its beauty, will create more problems then good , they can trap waste and harder to clean pond . they do better at middle or upper level where there is stronger waterflow or at shady places they remain clearner from algae

Rocks imo should be mortared, so no place for muck to accumulate....like in liner wrinkles. Vacuuming is easier imo because no wrinkle and it's an incentive to clean the pond. As I vacuum I get to see beautiful rocks rather than uncovering ugly wrinkles. But that's personal taste. Rocks don't turn black, maybe some obscure mineral types do, unless covered in muck for awhile. But yeah, they get covered pretty fast so vacuuming once every 2 weeks can be needed. TPRs or any pump flow directed at the bottom will keep at least a portion of the bottom pretty clean all the time. Texture of rock, just like winkles, still shows through. It's a look I prefer, but matter of taste.

 

[alex chappelear]

Settlement chamber can be anywhere. Didn't understand the pressure stuff. You mean like friction loss in a long pipe run? Yes, but pipe can be sized correct to eliminate that problem.

Normally these days in Water Garden the pond itself is used as a settlement chamber. External chambers, even vortex, fell out of favor years ago. They really don't work very well. Not saying you shouldn't, just wondering if you got some bad advice. There's plenty of that.


Absolutely. Just depends on the pump, where it is, sound proofing like a pump house, the falls sound and how good a person's hearing is.


Rocks imo should be mortared, so no place for muck to accumulate....like in liner wrinkles. Vacuuming is easier imo because no wrinkle and it's an incentive to clean the pond. As I vacuum I get to see beautiful rocks rather than uncovering ugly wrinkles. But that's personal taste. Rocks don't turn black, maybe some obscure mineral types do, unless covered in muck for awhile. But yeah, they get covered pretty fast so vacuuming once every 2 weeks can be needed. TPRs or any pump flow directed at the bottom will keep at least a portion of the bottom pretty clean all the time. Texture of rock, just like winkles, still shows through. It's a look I prefer, but matter of taste.

Settlement chamber can be anywhere. Didn't understand the pressure stuff. You mean like friction loss in a long pipe run? Yes, but pipe can be sized correct to eliminate that problem.

Normally these days in Water Garden the pond itself is used as a settlement chamber. External chambers, even vortex, fell out of favor years ago. They really don't work very well. Not saying you shouldn't, just wondering if you got some bad advice. There's plenty of that.


Absolutely. Just depends on the pump, where it is, sound proofing like a pump house, the falls sound and how good a person's hearing is.


Rocks imo should be mortared, so no place for muck to accumulate....like in liner wrinkles. Vacuuming is easier imo because no wrinkle and it's an incentive to clean the pond. As I vacuum I get to see beautiful rocks rather than uncovering ugly wrinkles. But that's personal taste. Rocks don't turn black, maybe some obscure mineral types do, unless covered in muck for awhile. But yeah, they get covered pretty fast so vacuuming once every 2 weeks can be needed. TPRs or any pump flow directed at the bottom will keep at least a portion of the bottom pretty clean all the time. Texture of rock, just like winkles, still shows through. It's a look I prefer, but matter of taste.

Incredible photos. Thank you everyone. If the walls slope or step down towards the bottom drains would I still need to vacum anything? (I thought pond vacuumes were for people with no bottom drains) I guess I couldn't do rocks only on the walls and not the bottom? Was hoping if bottom was 6 feet deep and just black rubber it would kind of disappear out of sight like a deep hole in a rocky river. Will thick ice tear apart cemented rock work?

If the epdm only lasts 30 years and I'm going to cement a lot of weight of rocks and boulders covering all of it. It sounds like a nightmare when time to replace the liner. Possibly it lasts longer when covered with all this? Would be impossible to find leak when covered with rocks /cement so at that point only option would be to clean rocks and spray on polyurea?

I guess there are limits to how many gph can go through a seive so big ponds must use multiple seives? (Or a real big DIY seive) but that would still be Smaller than a 1000 gallon sediment tank. After the seives get water from bottom drains and skimmers I just have to get my pipe real level to make it 70 feet to my hidden spacious gravity fed filtration area. Does that sound okay?

 

[Waterbug]

Slope side doesn't effect muck. It doesn't slide down by gravity.

Just a bottom drain will only pull stuff a limited distance from the drain. Couple of feet out, depends on different things. In a good system jets of water (TPRs) push muck to the drain. This is normally done by creating a current rotation and that creates a vortex (like a little tornado) where all muck ends up near the drain. There are a few different rotation patterns depending on pond shape, number of drains, etc...

In a clear pond you could read a newspaper on the bottom, even at 6'. The pond in that last pic is 5' deep.

Ice has little effect on cement rock work. There's a bit of hysteria surrounding ice and all kinds of things. Use of concrete and mortar is extremely common in all cold climates. Sidewalks, ponds, pools. It's the internet, everyone is an expert. Used to be a person only got "expert" advice from nosey neighbors. Now they're all online and we get to hear from thousands of them.

45 mil EPDM is normally rated by the manufacturer to degrade by 1 mil per year in UV. So they say 25 year life normally. That would still leave 20 mil, but at some point there would be a failure. So real life could be anywhere in the 25-45 year range. But that's for full sun. When protected from UV they think should last more than 50 years. It hasn't been in use long enough to have good data. Some people think protected it could often last more than 100 years.

Removing mortared rock is very easy. I test for leaks before adding rock. Mortared rock protects the liner. There shouldn't be any reason to think holes would appear. What would cause them?

Spraying polyurea on mortared rock would be a very bad idea. Polyurea requires a very stable structure. Mortar rock is very thin, cracks all over. Perfectly fine over a liner.

Generally it's one sieve filter per drain hole.

I have no idea if 70' is would work or not. Depends on pipe size, number and type of fitting, pipe material and flow. With that info a calculation can be done to know what to expect.

 

[alex chappelear]

Plan is for 15,000 gallons. 2 helix skimmers and 2 bottom drains they all would gravity feed a DIY sieve after going through some sort of leaf net to get the big stuff out first. There is a Profidrum through koi acres rated for 15,000 gallons per hour that I may use instead (yet it cost about the same as 4 nexus seives yet will filter down to 70 microns instead of 300 microns. If I can get down to 70 microns I may skip a sediment tank.

What size pipes for each helix skimmer, I'm assuming 4"? If so that makes four 4" gravity fed lines entering seive/filter box which means if I do a moving bed bio filter after that I would need four 4" connectors connecting the 2. Of build DIY seive suspended over a big trough shapped moving bed to avoid connectors. This would mean no sediment tank

But how will an external pump (which I assume uses a single 2" pipe) hook up to something with four 4" gravity lines. I need to ensure my bottom drains get enough flow rate to help keep them cleaned out, I could do that by making my skimmer lines 2"?

 

[Meyer Jordan]

If you are planning on operating the skimmers and the BDs at the same time you will need a quite large pump.
Reducing pipe size will not impact flow rate as long as you stay with the recommended pipe size or larger. Going below the recommended size will actually reduce flow rate due to friction loss.

 

[Mucky_Waters]

You would be much better off putting skimmers and bottom drains on separate lines and separate pumps.

 

[alex chappelear]

You would be much better off putting skimmers and bottom drains on separate lines and separate pumps.

So on a gravity fed system if they are on separate pumps that would mean separate seives, separate sediment tanks and separate biofilter since the pumps are the last step?

 

[Mucky_Waters]

So on a gravity fed system if they are on separate pumps that would mean separate seives, separate sediment tanks and separate biofilter since the pumps are the last step?

You don't have to have the pump as the very last step to have a gravity fed system. In most pond systems with seives the pump is located directly after the seive and biofilters and polishing filter are located after the pump. Same goes for sediment tanks systems.
The idea of a gravity fed bottom drain is that the sediment on the bottom of the pond flows gently to the sediment tank or sieve where it can be more easily captured in it's intact state as opposed to going through a pump first and getting blended up into much finer particles that are much harder to capture.

 

[Lisak1]

Ice has little effect on cement rock work

I'm going to disagree with you on that @Waterbug . Yes we have concrete driveways and sidewalks and you name it, but they are definitely affected by freezing and thawing. Pitting, cracking, and heaving of concrete are all common in our zone, especially if people don't know how to install it correctly - and there are lots of "experts" who don't. We had a concrete driveway installed and got a one year guarantee against pitting and cracking. No guarantees against heaving. Same is true of anything mortared. My neighbor is replacing some stone walls he had put in 5 years ago as the mortar is all cracking and being forced out of the joints and the wall is collapsing. Dry stack is a better way to build with rock in our climate.

 

[Mucky_Waters]

I'm going to disagree with you on that @Waterbug . Yes we have concrete driveways and sidewalks and you name it, but they are definitely affected by freezing and thawing. Pitting, cracking, and heaving of concrete are all common in our zone, especially if people don't know how to install it correctly - and there are lots of "experts" who don't. We had a concrete driveway installed and got a one year guarantee against pitting and cracking. No guarantees against heaving. Same is true of anything mortared. My neighbor is replacing some stone walls he had put in 5 years ago as the mortar is all cracking and being forced out of the joints and the wall is collapsing. Dry stack is a better way to build with rock in our climate.

Now you are just being one of those hysterical internet experts.

 

[Lisak1]

Now you are just being one of those hysterical internet experts.

Is it that obvious??