Reviving 2 Falls

[Coyoteyip]

Hi! I inherited 2 water features that came with my new house; both are creeks with pondless waterfalls. I am reviving them after what looks to be years of them laying unused. I have been successful in getting them both to operate again (it was a big moment to see both running with water and I can't believe how much they add to enjoying the property!) But, in both cases, there remains one very big final challenge - they are both losing water. To the tune of 2 inches every 3 hours of operation (measured inside the pump vault.) From what I've read, I should need to re-fill the basin maybe once a week, rather than every day.

Can you help me sleuth why this might be? I've done this project DIY so far (with big help from reading this forum) and would love to solve this mystery. I greatly appreciate any of your ideas and suggestions.

What I've tried so far is to check the liner around the edge of both creeks for leaks (only very small ones I fixed.) i didn't fully excavate each basin, but enough that I could see that each has a pump vault that has big holes near the bottom where other structures are loosely pushed up against it (like other vaults on their sides with holes, but not like those matrix-blocks.) Water goes down through rocks into those structures and into the pump vault. Below are pics and details of each creek.

Front Creek
55 ft long, 3 ft high. This has a new Beckett 3550gph pump from Home Depot. (too much? Stream flow seems good.) 1.5 inch tubing from pump connects to 2 inch underground tubing to fall.

Back Creek
45 ft long, 5 ft high. This has a new Smartpond 3600 pump from Lowes. (stream seems good when running)
On this one, the pipe goes up to the first fall and has a PVC T connection. This stream works. The pipe continues to another Fall that is controlled with a ball joint, but no water comes from this stream no matter how I turn the joint.

 

[JRS]

Welcome! I am wondering if as long as those streams are, bubbling over all the rocks it isn't just evaporation. Based on the size of your foot vs. the well, they don't look huge, which would rapidly lower the level.

 

[Coyoteyip]

Welcome! I am wondering if as long as those streams are, bubbling over all the rocks it isn't just evaporation. Based on the size of your foot vs. the well, they don't look huge, which would rapidly lower the level.

Wow; could evaporation disappear that much water? And inch an hour from the pump vault? I am no expert in this, so I never considered that. Other posts that I have read made it seem that perhaps I should be losing this much water each week, not each day. If that's the case, these might just be cost-prohibitive to operate.

PS. The size of the pump vaults is deceptive because they both look about the same size from top, but one is fairly shallow (24" deep?) while the other is probably 48" deep. And both have holes where they are pushed up against other buried vaults that create voids so adding more water volume. They're both losing water at similar rates if that matters.

 

[IPA]

From the pictures I’d guess you are loosing a lot from wicking as well.

 

[Phaewryn]

You said, "no water comes from this stream no matter how I turn the joint". You could have found the problem there. That could be a bad fitting and where your loss is. I'd remove that and replace it with a new one and see if that becomes functional (or at least provides an effective shut-off to the final non-functional stream which may be where your water is disappearing into). I assume you have tried turning it as much as you can in both directions and checking to see if that changes the water loss rate over a day? You also said, "the pump vaults...both have holes where they are pushed up against other buried vaults that create voids so adding more water volume. They're both losing water at similar rates if that matters." Are they both connected to the same underground tubing run or to one another? Losing water at the same rate would seem to be implying that that amount of loss is the normal amount of evaporation unless the two are connected to one another by something that could be leaking, thus causing them both to drop at the same rate due to equally sharing a leaking element. If you take more photos of everything you can see (including inside the vaults, any fittings you can reach, etc.) we might be able to throw some more ideas at you for finding leaking elements. I assume the vaults are constructed like in this video, and there is a liner that contains the vault and the "voids" you speak of? If so, then you could have a leak anywhere in the liner below any of that. But before you go digging up the entire thing, I'd try digging up just the hoses and be sure your leak isn't in one of those, because it will be a much easier fix if so. I will say this, the simple fact that your property had such a potentially impressive water feature, but that when they were trying to sell the house it wasn't running and appears to have been laying unused for years tells you a lot. Either the previous owners also could not afford that much water loss (it's quite common for older water features to have lost a lot of water but the cost of water didn't used to be so high so it wasn't a problem until municipal water rates skyrocketed - people just filled them back up with no concern for the cost of water), or it is, and has been nonfunctional for a long time due to any number of reasons which made the previous owner give up and call it a loss. If it turns out that it's just evaporation and the cost of municipal water is too high to rationalize running it long-term, you might consider having a well company come out and drill you a well (of not necessarily potable water) just to fill the pond with. If you aren't using it as a potable water system, you might be able to get a shallower well for less cost and it would be a one-time cost rather than an ongoing municipal water bill.
https://extension.psu.edu/drilling-a-new-well
https://www.homeadvisor.com/cost/landscape/drill-a-well/