Building & Maintaining Water Gardening Installations. Top Tips To Ponder

1. The pond installation is the most cumbersome and therefore the most difficult part of the total pond building project. Take the trouble to get it right. If you do not feel comfortable installing the pond then look for help and this is especially true for pond electrics.  Most important do not rush it - take your time, get it to fit well into the hole, create good back fill and edging support where necessary. The pond will be there for a long time to come so an extra few days spent getting the pond building job right will be well worth it. For pre formed pond installations TAKE trouble to get the pond level. If you don't your garden fish pond will appear lopsided once the water has been filled into it and it will bug you for the rest of time. Use a level. For larger ponds use a black plastic liner designed for pond building. Look for a 15 year or more guarantee and get the pond surround area level. This may well involve building a retaining wall.

2. What's the best garden fish pond size? This is an impossible question to answer. Here are some useful guidelines ... as a general rule, spend more on a small pond than go for a larger pond and try to save on pond equipment and supplies. A beautiful small garden pond including all necessary equipment can be created within a day or two by unskilled people choosing the DIY approach for a cost, for a small 300/400 litre goldfish pond. As the size of your pond increases then the cost will increase in proportion. The really top notch koi ponds will cost tens of thousands of pounds. All garden fish ponds will incur running costs and maintenance. If the ideas in this site are understood and followed both costs and maintenance will be reduced dramatically. In the long run buying branded pond equipment will pay off.

3. Using a pond liner. The fundamental potential problem with a pond liner lies with the fact that a liner is relatively thin at between 300 and 500 microns normally. However; high quality liner is perfect for most garden ponds when the correct material is used ... material like Polyex or Butyl rubber or PVC so long as it is genuine pond building PVC material and not general purpose garden sheeting. Avoid complex shapes. Do not worry about the liner pleats that will inevitably remain in the pond. If you are going to build a liner pond, before placing the liner in the excavated hole it is important to line the hole with underlay, we often provide free underlay with Polyex liner material they sell) to prevent stones finding their way to the interface with the liner and possibly puncturing it. If you have dogs that like swimming then a liner pond can be a bad idea since clawing the liner will inevitably damage it.

4. The best type of garden fish pond or water garden is the one that suits your idea in terms of size and appearance. The choices are plastic pond liners and rocklike fibreglass ponds, rigid plastic preformed pond designs of various sizes (normally black) and concrete ponds. Unless you want a really big pond to keep and grow big prize winning koi then it's probably best to avoid concrete (however in some situations and certainly on steep ground some concrete work will be needed even with a liner or preformed pond. Concrete ponds are expensive to do properly and need expert skills. For smaller ponds of up to 800 litres choose pre formed fibreglass. These are simplest to install and also low cost. For most garden ponds and pond builder, liners are probably cheapest overall and give you tremendous design flexibility.

5. When you first fill your garden fish pond or water garden do yourself a big favour. Record how much water it takes to fill the pond and then keep this information safe somewhere. You will need this information to specify a number of products and also for future reference. Don't lose the information unless you can recalculate the volume yourself. If your pond is square or rectangular and is the same depth throughout it is very simple. All that is required is to multiply the length by the width by the depth. To calculate the volume of water in the pond in litres use metres to measure the dimensions and multiply the result by 1,000. For example for a pond of 3 m length * 2 m width * 0.5 m deep the volume of water it can hold is 3,000 litres of water. If your pond is not a simple rectangle or square then you have to approximate ... here's an excellent yet simple way to do this volume estimation.

Another 5 water gardening quick tips here

Previous 5 water gardening quick tips here

This table will help you with converting units from one type to another (for example 1 Imperial Gallon/min = 0.16 Cu. Feet/min, 4.55 Litres/min or 0.005 Cu. Metres/min) ...

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