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My Fish Pond
Back in 2002 I finished building a fishpond. It is a brick, concrete block and cement construction. The filter system is based on the famous spider. I built the filter myself using 40 mm waste pipe with lots of 3mm holes drilled into it. I laid the network of 40 mm pipes on the bottom of the pond and the intake is from the middle of the network. See pictures. The pipe network has approx 130mm of pea shingle sitting on top. This is the filter medium. The pump is an Oase Aquamax and is situated externally from the pond. No wires or pump visible in the pond. The pump sits under the middle slab nearest the house, just outside the pond. You will see from the pictures where the hole is for the pump. From memory the pump is the 14000 litre per hour/250 watt pump. The pond capacity is approx 14000 litres. The pond water has been crystal clear from day one. The filter does a great job. Eventually I guess I will have to empty the pond and remove the accumulated waste and debris. No sign of the shingle clogging up as yet, 6 years on. The water flow is as strong as ever. Folks seem to spend a lot of money on these large external filter boxes etc and their ponds still go cloudy in the summer. Mine doesn’t (smug grin). The fishpond is approx 3 metres wide by 4 metres long and 1.14 metres deep. The dimensions are a mixture of metric and imperial as the bricks and blocks used for the inside wall are in imperial. The inside wall of the pond is constructed with 9" blocks, 5 blocks high from the 9” thick base which makes the pond 45 inches deep (that’s where the 1.14 metres comes from). The 9” base actually consists of 4.5” hardcore and 4.5” concrete. Please see pictures for explanation. The outside wall is constructed of blocks up to just below ground level and bricks from there up. The wall has a 3” cavity which I backfilled with a cement ballast mixture. I made a mistake when it came to rendering. I did the rendering in alternate sections using 12mm thick batons for the render thickness. This was a mistake because I ended up with joints between the sections. These joints allowed the water to pass (not good). What I should have done was to do all the rendering in one go. I would have still used the batons but removed them as I went along. This would mean that all the rendering would have been done in one go(no leaky joints). The concrete render (and joints) was sealed using G4 blagdon pond paint. I also gave the wall a good coat of aquaseal bitumastic. Make sure you use the one for drinking water tanks as some of the bitumastic products on the market contain chemicals that will kill fish. I could not find the right slabs to put around the top of the wall, so I made a wooden frame and made the cement top in situ. They look like slabs. I used a red dye in the cement. There are numerous fish in the pond. 3 koi, blue and golden Orfe, Goldfish, Golden Tench and some wild fish which hatched from pondweed. I have an Arum lily and some pond lilies. The Grey Heron often sits on the wall but rarely succeeds in catching my fish as he cannot wade in the pond. He has had a few Orfe in the summer when they swim out from under the Lily pads. One of my Blue Orfe has a chunk missing out of his back from the Herons efforts last summer. I also added a small clear pipe into the main 40mm return which gives a nice venturi bubble effect back into the pond. The fish like the extra oxygen. This also means that my pond has never iced over in winter. Not even a little. The pond was built raised on purpose because there are(were)lots of small relatives who visited and we did not want them swimming in the pond!
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Contributor's Note
I thought I would share my pond building experience with you!
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That is a fantastic, professional looking fish pond you built there. It so happens I just started digging a duck pond. I was told to put fish in it to keep the water clean, but after reading this I may want to investigate filters and filtration techniques. P.S. Your intel would be a lot more easily readable if it were separated into paragraphs. Otherwise, great job, and thanks for the photos!
 |  | nick Jun 17, 2008 04:46 | |
CONTRIBUTOR'S REPLY
Hi Nick, Thank for the comments. Point taken about the paragraphs. It is difficult to read! I have also done a cheesy little video of how I built the pond on Youtube. Cheers, Paul copy and paste the following into your browser: - http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=6DZIyD8stSY
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This intel was contributed by Paul Good
Paul Good
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May, 2012
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