wall between small upper pool w/waterfall and main pond

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i have a question regarding the best way to structure the partition between an upper waterfall pool and the main pond as shown in my awesome picture.

my pool on the left is roughly 15" deep, and i'm using stacked chilton cut strip stone (~3" thick, 4-6" wide, 8-12" long) to build the wall between that pool and the main pond (represented by the dark gray blocks). my coping shelf between the two is angled slightly back in retaining wall fashion so the center of gravity of the wall will be leaning back toward the pool slightly.

i have seen designs where people just go straight up, without backfill, and run the liner of the small pool directly up the wall. for some reason this seems less than ideal. i think i would rather backfill with dirt as shown in the picture to provide more support for the wall, and put the liner over that. does this make sense? can i get away with doing this without a concrete footing for the retaining wall?
 

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addy1

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in my humble opinion yes, the dirt does a nice job of supporting when placed as a backfill. My bog wall (lower) is just a dirt berm.
 
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15" by how wide? 2 feet or so and I would say yes since its only like 200 lbs of water weight, and most is strait down. Now if it was a large pool/pond about 6' or larger then it would be a ton of weight to hold back without support.
 

addy1

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my bog is 2.5 feet deep, 28 feet long , 5 feet wide (more or less, it varies a little), the dirt berm is 3 feet high, going from around 6 inches width, on the top to 3 feet or so on the bottom. The combined weight of the pea gravel and water must be up there, so far no issues.
 
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installed the bottom drain yesterday and plumbed it to my skimmer, dropped the liner in today, and started filling!

i'm so glad the bottom drain/liner parts are done, i was dreading those.
 

addy1

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Fantastic, glad it is going good. I always fill the pond, run nothing for a few days and see if the level stays up there.
 
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yeah, it will be a few days before the pump arrives from DoDad, so i'll finish my retaining wall and maybe do some of the coping shelf tomorrow and just watch it until tuesday.
 

addy1

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It really helps so when you add features at least you know your pond is not leaking! Ours sat full for a month if not longer while I worked on the stream, humm in thinking it was 6 months before the stream was done.............winter sort of stopped the build, we didn't get the pump plumbed in until this spring.

But anyways by the time we had those parts running we knew the pond did not leak ...........lmao
 

fishin4cars

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I wish you were psoting pics, i would like to see some of this as it has been being put together, I would really like to see someone first hand installing a bottom drain and there input as they went along.
 
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i have actually been taking pics of the progress, so i will post them when i get the chance. i will probably post them as links to my photobucket though, because it's too much of a hassle to downsize them all for this site.

also i'm worried people will point out mistakes that are too late to fix :regular_waving_emot
 
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i made one kind of big one that i'm leaving as is. I installed the savio skimmer so the front weir was flush with the inner surface of the coping shelf. that seemed to make more sense to me because that way it wasn't recessed, which i thought would hinder its intake.

today when i installed the liner though i realized the weir should've been flush with the outer perimeter of the coping shelf so the liner laid better. the only downside i can see is the liner will be tougher to hide, but it's not that big of a deal.
 

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