Meandering pond

[Chumley]

i have the fever and would like to add a meandering stream to my current setup. It would not be attached to the pond. If the stream is designed to weave around current boulders, coming down the slope with the pond-less basin at the bottom, wouldn't the volume of water in the stream be an issue when the pump is turned off daily? I am thinking it would need an overfill drain or we would have to oversize the reservoir to accommodate the extra water. Is there a way to estimate the size of the pump and reservoir based on length and width of the stream or is it the distance from the beginning to end of the run that determines it? Does anyone have any pictures of long, narrow meandering streams? I am thinking a maximum of 18" in width with many small, 4-6 inch drops. There is about an eight foot slope in grade and about 30 feet from top to bottom (waterfall to reservoir). I attached a picture of the area for consideration. Our current pond is shown in the second picture and is directly to the left of the area under consideration. Thanks everyone.

 

[Lisak1]

Sounds like a fun idea!

I'm sure there is some mathematical formula to figure out how much water your reservoir needs to hold, but I don't do the maths, so... Same with pump size - something to do with how far and how high and how fast you want the water to go/flow, but you won't get the answer from me!

You definitely want the reservoir appropriately sized, even if you don't intentionally turn your stream off - a power outage would cause an overflow for example. You could also build your stream with a number of pooling areas to hold extra water. That's what we did in our pondless waterfall - we have two small pools built in that each hold water even when the waterfall isn't running so the basin didn't need to be quite as big.