Building a pond questions

TORQUIN · Sep 29, 2004

Gee, what luck seeing this thread. I am building my own pond now. It will be small and diamond shaped, perhaps 120' across th elongest 2 points. And doggone it, I'm not in a hurry, so it will be built with my L3830, I think.
I'll let you know if I ever get discouraged. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

I will be checking out the links you guys have supplied.. I'm sure they will be helpful.

Chris

have_blue · Sep 30, 2004

( Gee, what luck seeing this thread. I am building my own pond now. Chris )

You will find the digging is easy. A small disk harrow quickly and easily loosens up the dirt, and the FEL quickly moves. The hard part is transporting the dirt any distance away from the pond.

Good luck. You'll need it. /forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif

armyret · Sep 30, 2004

I have been reading all the posts, and I am sure glad that I do not have to contend with all the aforemention problems. I have a 1 1/2 acre pond built with a tractor and front end loader and scraper blade. Was there mistakes, yes, can they be tolortated yes. I had a natural wet low lying area with good drainage to keep it full. In fact I could just as easy construct another one below the current one of same size or bigger. Mistakes on this pond is that the edges are not deep enough therefore causing weed growth. One straight 7 inch overflow pipe and one with a 90 on it a little lower than the 7 incher. Emergency spill way works great. Problem is I keep losing fish through both drainage pipes. When pond gets high the suction pressure is enormous. tried everything and nothing works great. Now have covered both with clay
pots and holes in them, but does not let enough water through and they keep becomming cloged. Ideas accepted. I do have a shaded side and weeds not so bad there. I started reading this post for I need to build a pond rake that will work off of my boom pole attached to tractor do not need to clean weeds no more that 6 to 8 feet from bank. I really need a back hoe and deepen the edges. Enviormental tells me that depth is the key to elimitaing weeds.
Hope this did not bore anyone.

TORQUIN · Sep 30, 2004

I'm thinking you need a screen on your pipes so you can keep your fish. You'd have to make it out of expanded metal, and at least 50% larger than your pipes, to give it the extra surface area to withstand clogging. You'd probably want ti 12-14" deep, and necked down to the diameter of the pipe.
I'd go with the largest holes I could stand, in the metal, so you might lose minnows and smaller fish, but it would be less likely to clog. And if they do clog, that's OK, it will wait until you unclog it, if your spillway works correctly.

Please know that I have absolutely no pond digging or draining experience, I'm just talking from common sense and remembering what I have seen in other places in the past.

Chris

PineRidge · Sep 30, 2004

Armyret a company called Agri Drain makes a product called a bar guard that will serve your purpose well. I have one installed on the overflow pipe of my pond and it has yet to plug. It also keeps my fish in the pond where they belong. Call them toll free at 1-800-232-4742

txdon · Sep 30, 2004

I have an 8" drainpipe. On the end in the pond is a capped 5' piece of 8" pipe with about 300-500 - 1/2" drilled holes in the pipe. Works great.

have_blue · Oct 1, 2004

Hi armyret,

Just to give you some ideas, here's how I'm planning my pond.

My pond has a 2 foot tall, 12 foot wide levee around it. It's already covered with bermudagrass, which looks pretty and prevents erosion. Maximum water level will be 24" below the tops of the levee (ground level). My 10 acres are landscaped so that all runoff water is directed into the pond. The water will enter the pond at 1 choke point, which is a large limestone gravel filter bed. The water will percolate through the coarse gravel, run beneath the levee, and up into the pond. The filter bed is big enough so that partial stoppage won't stop the flow significantly.

If the pond level rises, the water will back up through the filter, and no fish can escape.

There is no need for an emergency spillway. Excessive water will simply run off without going into the pond. I would have to get a 1000 year flood to rise above the levee. If that happens, the pond would be the least of my worries.

Mistakes? Well... maybe my levees are a bit higher than necessary, but were a good place to dispose of the rich topsoil I have dug out. The levees are still settling, and I suspect will wind up at only 18" high or less

armyret, how many yards of soil did you remove from your pond? I need to move nearly 20,000 yards, and that's way too much for my tractor and FEL!

armyret · Oct 1, 2004

Hi Have Blue:

I do wish that I could respond factually but cannot. I have no idea how much dirt was removed. My pond location was perfect. It was sloped on both sides and was sort of a swamp area.or at least a wet area/\. All that was needed was to construct a earthern dam acrose the end and instal drainage and emergency overflow. It could have been constructed deeper. Only 9 to 10 feet at the dam. 5 at the shallow end.
I am so fortunate that my pond never gets muddy, I presume that the fields and forest on one side filters it good. The soil just does not lend itself to muddy water. The bigest mistake was the drainage pipes. Someone just posted something that I will try and that is to entend the pipe further out in the pond with 4 or 500 1/2 inch holes in it and cap the end to prevent fish loss. I will try to post a photo when I learn how. In my opinion My pond is inpressive. The bigest problem is gueese.
They like it and they can make a mess. Good luck

have_blue · Oct 2, 2004

armyret:

What's important for your filter is area. If your overflow pipe is say 8", the filter should be quite a bit bigger. You could "T" into it with a long piece of larger pipe with the ends plugged, an drill your holes. Another way would be a stainless or aluminum frame "cage", wrapped with stainless or at least galvanized hardware cloth. If it's big enough, it will never completely stop up.

Best,,,

PHSteph · Oct 3, 2004

I have a pond in the Catskills that was dredged about 50 years ago. It does not have any of the fancy things you guys have been talking about (fountains, filters, liners, overflow pipes, or emergency overflows), but it is beautiful. It is in the side of a hill and has an earth dam on the other side. Unfortunately, it leaks (probably because of muskrats, which are fun to watch, but I just learned from the string that they can make holes in your levee. The levee is also washed out on one side, down to bedrock, so it is not as deep as it used to be. Any suggestions about how I could plug the hole and build the dam back up? Can I do this while there is water in the pond? (I'm not going to attempt this myself--I'm looking for somebody with a back hoe.)
Steph

Henro · Oct 4, 2004

PHsteph,

My pond is spring fed and around here muskrats can be a problem.

What works for my neighbor and I (with me following his advice) is keeping the level of the pond very close to the level of the top of the "levee" side of the pond.

Seems that to do their damage, the muskrats will tunnel into the earth, under water level, then come up and built a den, or whatever you call it. If you keep the water high enough, when the come up, they see daylight and soon know to go somewhere else, like the high side of the pond, if it is in a sloping area like mine is.

I have a flat area all around my pond now, and have not seen signs of muskrats for a number of years. I once tried putting chicken wire in the mud at the pond edge, but honestly don't know if that helped or not. Probably was a waste of time...

I don't know what one would do if his pond were not spring fed, and level varried a lot with season.

Another thought. I used to mix cement with my clay soil if I wanted to make a plug where I had leakage in my pond. I have not done this for ages, but I believe it worked and the clay-cement mix hardened much better than clay alone. You might consider a test if you need something to harden up a bit and keep the water in better.I am pretty sure this can help in some cases. I sure believed it did when I did it.

bczoom · Oct 4, 2004

Henro,

A pond with no muskrats in your area??? You're pretty darn lucky.
Another good option to plug holes created by the varmints is bentonite. It's very easy to get in a hole and I've never had a muskrat go back into it.

Dargo · Oct 4, 2004

Before I moved to where I am now and built my own pond, I lived on a shared lake with 16 other houses. We had the same problem with muskrats eating away at our dam. I first planned on trapping them, but the other homeowners thought that would be cruel and could trap someone's dog. (If you've seen a muskrat trap, that is not really possible) My current method, using a 7mm Magnum and picking them off was also not acceptable in a populated area.

We ended up bringing out an expert from some government department that specializes in soil erosion and conservation. The first thing he did was to flush a different colored dye down everyone's toilet to see if anyone was polluting the lake. Sure enough, two of my neighbors were given 10 days to repair their septic systems or move out of their house until the problem was corrected (talk about harsh!). The second thing he did was to have this drilling rig come out and drill holes about every 3 or 4 feet all the way across our dam and inject Bentonite (sp?).

Apparently not only was our dam leaking, but it was actually moving. By going off of survey markings, their corp of engineers concluded that our dam had actually moved about 6" outwards over the last 40 years. Anyway, this Bentonite stuff, i'm told there are several varities of it, pretty well turned the dirt in our dam practically into concrete. All of the leaks stopped and the guys with the survey equipment came back every 6 months or so for a couple of years and they seemed satisfied that our dam quit moving.

All of the houses on the lake shared in the expense of this fix and the state provided much of the work for us to maintain the water ecology or something. Anyway, after they were gone, we dug up the top of one of their drillings and checked out their bentonite stuff. It looked like dirt, but you couldn't hardly drive a nail into it. I only lived there another couple of years, but it did fix the problem. Oh yeah, I got a kick out of it when the state guy told us that we ought to trap those muskrats out of the lake! Where I live now, I have those irritating things boring into my island causing big sink holes around the edges. I need to check the sites on my 7mm mag anyway. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

bczoom · Oct 4, 2004

( Anyway, this Bentonite stuff, i'm told there are several varities of it, pretty well turned the dirt in our dam practically into concrete.
Anyway, after they were gone, we dug up the top of one of their drillings and checked out their bentonite stuff. It looked like dirt, but you couldn't hardly drive a nail into it.

Where I live now, I have those irritating things boring into my island causing big sink holes around the edges. I need to check the sites on my 7mm mag anyway. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif )

I'd recommend to anyone that has a pond visited by muskrats to keep a couple bags of bentonite around. If you can't get them with a 7mm (or equivalent) before they start digging you're probably going to need it.
A few years back, I didn't see a hole and they burrowed all the way through the bank thus draining about 12" of water out of the pond. The water flowing through it bored the hole out to about 10" diameter. I packed with bentonite and it never leaked through there again.

weedsportpete · Oct 5, 2004

Where can you get Bentonite? I looked around some last year and all I could find was a place in Ohio that was going to charge more for shipping than the cargo.
Thanks

bczoom · Oct 5, 2004

( Where can you get Bentonite? I looked around some last year and all I could find was a place in Ohio that was going to charge more for shipping than the cargo.
Thanks )

I've got some e-mails out to friends that use it a lot. Waiting to hear back.
If you want to check with some places near you, you may want to check with companies that have the following services (probably in the order listed). Not sure if they'll sell retail but it may be worth a shot.
Groundwater and remediation services (companies that clean up ground under and near gas stations).
Companies that install underground pools.
Companies that install wells.
Companies that build ponds.

Bird · Oct 5, 2004

Add to your list:

Companies that drill oil wells.

bczoom · Oct 5, 2004

Bird,

I'd thought of that but didn't include. Oil wells aren't real big between Rochester and Syracuse NY. Must be a TX thing. /forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif

bczoom · Oct 6, 2004

Weedsportpete,

Got some e-mails back.
For your location (and many others), the best source for getting bentonite would be from a well digging company.

Going rate is about $15-20 for a 50# bag.

(for the groundwater and remediation service companies, they use a lot but have the well drillers bring it to the site)