Took 7 years, but finally achieved success on the pond project, at least from an engineering standpoint. Leaks are always the biggest issues with any sort of residential water feature like this. Concrete cracks, plastic and rubber degrades, sealants are less than perfect and water goes downhill, no matter what. One of the neighbors across the street eventually removed a little waterfall project in his front entryway after a few years of struggling to repair leaks. So I went a completely different direction, creating a “self-sealing” pond liner with a combination of materials and lots of time spent getting it done.
It started with a thin, plastic liner which lasted only the first season 7 years ago, as expected. Then began the annual spring ritual of coating the thing with various stuff, mostly truck bed liner, which seemed to be the most appropriate goo for this application. After 5 years of that and alot of wasted water, the process started in the fall, with a layer of fiber-ed roof coating. That stuff practically never really fully dries and they even warn you not to top coat it for 3-4 months. Four coats of TBL this past spring on top of the 2nd roof coat treatment and voila – no leaks! I’ll run the whole process again starting in October. After that, I expect it to last practically forever and never leak again.
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The pics are in chronological order, over the past 3 months. The water quality/clarity is evident in that 1st niteshot. We’re at mid-August now with the filter still flowing freely. There were at least 4 different iterations of the filter setup before settling on a lava-rock and matala mat combo that seems to be working really well. The flora is just whatever survived the winter – no planting this year, with only absolutely necessary trips to Home Despot on the schedule nowadays. Seems unlikely we’ll get much of a crop out of that corn and sunflowers. 🙂