Getting enough posts to move this to a dedicated thread rather than the miscellaneous one! Going to go back and harvest all those posts and paste them in here. Future updates will be in this thread. Round-up posts to catch up are going to be very lighting edited strictly for formatting.
The Gist
I want to look at some live fish while I'm outside. Everything else flows from that.
The Concept
A big rounded poly stocktank with a window cut into one side, filled with gravel, some hardware, and enough water current to keep some stream-loving minnow species.
The Livestock
Aiming to keep some interesting minnows I can catch locally. So far I definitely want some Yellowfin Shiners (Notropis lutipinnis) and either some River Chub or Bluehead Chub (Nocomis spp.)
Some local examples
Status
Fall 2022: Gathering pieces, fitting them together, and modifying the plan on-the-fly. The same way I build Lego!
Outlook: No fish before 2023 most likely.
Getting an idea to help grow plants in my poly stock tank pond project. Even with the (roughly 15"x15" square) viewing window I want to put into the front, it doesn't really get enough direct sunlight during the day for most submerged plants to grow well. So my original "Just let it be an underwater jungle" idea needs to go.
I'm toying with having a planter stand holding up a 24" window box-type planter growing some emergent plants and dedicating the actual underwater volume mostly to hardscape, maybe with some tufts of moss and hair algae.
So for my planter stand idea, I'm thinking of that tried and true construction method: PVC pipes and fittings! I would make a broad base, have two supports coming up in the middle, and two rails at the top to hold a planter or platform.
On/in this upper section I'll set the 24" planter box, filled with pea gravel, and plant some emergent/shoreline plants as a kind of low-tech hydroponic setup.
Underneath the planter, stretching from one vertical support to the other, a sheet of acrylic to separate the front and back halves of the tank and help keep the current circulating around the perimeter while not obstructing the view. A big interior transparent wall, in other words, to make sure the current has a single circuit to follow and doesn't interfere with itself against the tank walls. I could have a pump outlet at either end, pointing (say) right in the back and left in the front at opposite corners, to keep the current flowing in one continuous ring.
Here's my rough, Not-To-Scale sketches of the PVC plant stand with acrylic pane running across it:
I went ahead and mocked up the central planter idea with a couple of old plant stands holding up a standard window box planter. (I considered just using black metal plant stands like these except as far as I can find they're all the same rust-prone powder-coated steel and would disintegrate in short order if constantly submerged.)
15-inch tall plant stands for scale:
24-inch window box planter laid across plant stands:
Imagine a pump outlet in the front right and back left of the tank to create the circulation, and underneath the planter there's a big sheet of acrylic acting as an invisible barrier.
Rim of the planter just peeking out above the top of the tank on these plant stands:
View from the back (so you can see the plant-killing shadow cast by the tall tank walls at high noon in summer):
This is just to get a sense of the scale and composition of the concept and help me visualize the plan. Basically, big window-box planter in the middle of the tank with plants growing out of it.
Outside? Not great. I have considered it: just a couple of outdoor LED flood lights pointing in from the back of the tank, really. Just not the direction I wanted to go.
To be fair neither is this, but at least it aligns with my changing taste in the kind of fish I'd like to keep. Those chubs and minnows are stream-loving and the current helps keep their water oxygenated. With the right conditions the chub will also build a nest, which is necessary for the minnows to come into full spawning colors as well.
So I'm hoping for a tank that allows something like this:
Wheels - I'm sure I'm missing something obvious, but if the goal is to increase the amount of sunlight hitting the plants, why not just use a transparent tank? I see HUGE tanks (glass and acrylic) for sale for relative peanuts on CraigsList from people who just want to get rid of them. That planter looks to be somewhere between 20 and 40 gallons, and I see 40 gallon glass tanks for sale for $40 and a 70-gallon one for $150.
Also, what's the plan to combat algae? Won't a window (or walls of a transparent tank) will be impenetrable green probably within days? I vaguely remember having fish in my room as a young kid in a 15 or 20-gallon tank, and employed a large family of snails to keep the glass sorta-clean, but even then it needed a lot of elbow grease to stay on top of the growth. I admit that it could be that I had no idea what I was doing with the fish.
It's labeled 110 gallons, of which I figure probably 100 is more reasonable before adding in all the other stuff.
I have a possibly unreasonable dislike of acrylic aquariums. They scratch and "fog" (e.g. develop microscratches and pits, like car headlamps) very quickly. I have a big glass all-glass tank inside that I'm finally starting to get ready to think about doing something with. But for this project acrylic is pretty much the only reasonable option, since the poly stock tank is kind of uneven and glass plates have almost no "give."
It wasn't even originally my plan to put a window in it, but once I saw people doing the same kind of thing with their big plastic aquaponics buckets the idea just wouldn't leave my head.
It would also make viewing/photography a LOT easier and allow a little more light to reach the substrate, which MIGHT open the door to more plants at a later date.
So I'm pretty committed to the window. It's the rest of the project that I'm still in the "wouldn't it be neat?" stage about.
As for algae, I have a two-part plan. One is to install a Mean Green UV filter in the sump to keep greenwater to a minimum. Another is to let the growing emergent plants suck out all the nutrients quickly and out-compete the algae. Plants that grow above the water have an advantage compared to fully aquatic plants when it comes to out-competing algae. Another reason not to rely on artificial light!
For algae growing on surfaces, there are options ranging from freshwater snails to more fish (especially Central Stonerollers, another kind of minnow). It's also likely that I'll just let a certain amount of algae grow naturally. Hair algae is actually pretty good about keeping water conditions clean, and lots of fish will use it as food (or find their favorite food hiding in it). Greenwater (free-floating algae cells) and cyanobacteria are usually the ones that cause water quality problems. Thread algae isn't usually an issue unless you consider it unsightly; some fish love to snack on it and it can out-compete other types of algae.
Got some acrylic sheets (3/32" or 0.1" or 2.54mm thick) cut down at the hardware store. Glad I got two sheets just in case. They were 18" x 24" and I want them 18" square. Whoever sliced them up skewed both, one sheet is nearly a quarter of an inch off at one end of the cut and the other sheet is about an eighth. :facepalm: Shouldn't be too much of an issue. My plan is still to cut out a 15" square window in the front of the tank and have a 1.5" overlap between the tank wall and the acrylic all around. That should also give me 3/4" on either side of the holes, which will hopefully be enough to tighten them down pretty well without cracking them out to the edges of the sheet.
Going to need a sheet of neoprene or something as the gasket, since both acrylic and LDPE (what the tank is made of) are notoriously bad at sticking to adhesives like silicone caulk. Also going to need some steel AND rubber washers, bolts and nuts, and maybe something like a can of Plasti-Dip as an extra insurance policy against leaks at the bolt holes. (Plasti-Dip is pond safe when cured)
Laying up the 18" x 18" panel against the front of the tank for scale:
And view from the inside:
Also been playing around with the layout. Instead of having a planter dead center in the tank over a sheet of acrylic to separate front and back, I think I'll move the planter to the back rim of the tank and move the acrylic forward towards the window a bit. Mocked it out with plant stands, a flower pot, and a piece of wood to lay across where the acrylic divider would go:
This way, I hope to get a little more visibility out of the setup so that from the front and front-side POV more of the bottom is visible. The narrower section near the front will also create an area of higher current, versus the more spread out area in the back, which means the fish will have options about where to hang out.
To suspend the planter at the top back, I'm still thinking of putting together a stand from PVC painted black. But this version will be like an S turned on its side, the front part coming up to frame the acrylic tank divider and the back part forming the rack for the planter to sit on at the back. Also thinking of mounting something like driftwood to the top over the acrylic divider, or maybe a couple of smaller plant pots. With the window set in front, it should enhance fish visibility.
Still favoring a DIY filter by creating a side fountain with a pump to take the pond water and push it through a chamber of lava rock, maybe with some plants growing out of it, and letting it trickle back down a spout or waterfall into the pond near the front right. One of those three-tiered fountains made from terra cotta pots with some spouts, or something along those lines, to add visual interest while it cleans the water. I'd put the intake in the back right, somewhere beneath the green planter in the picture, and plumb the outflow into the front right corner. I think one of those circulating fan-style pumps on the back left will help keep the circulation moving around the perimeter of the tank.
Trying to find a suitable filter solution that isn't just "pot scrubbies and lava rock in a bucket beside the tank." My idea is to find or put together some kind of 3-tiered fountain where a pump takes water from the tank, sends it up to some kind of bowl or basin of lava rock, which trickles down into another bowl of lava rock, down into another bowl of lava rock before falling back into the pond. Since my original pond plan of just using heavy planting to filter the water isn't going to work, and I'm moving towards a kind of hardscaped stream aquascape, strong filtration and aeration is going to be critical for the fish. A lot of current-loving species need extra oxygenation and flowing water, they don't do so well in stagnant and still conditions.
The lava rock is the same red stuff that's popular in gas fire pits and landscaping; in the last dozen years or so it's become a budget-friendly DIY filter medium for large aquariums and ponds. It's extremely porous, which provides a lot of surface area for nitrifying bacteria to colonize and break down fish wastes as the water flows over, through, and around it. Basically hard, durable filter sponge. I could also try growing some nice-looking marsh plants in the basins hydroponically.
Having a hard time finding suitable vessels to build into the fountain, though. I was leaning towards real terracotta but I'm getting frustrated by irrelevant search results (Amazon search deserves a rant in the Things That Piss Me Off thread).
I don't think regular flower pots are going to do the job; maybe some of the lower, more squat variety. There are some large planting bowl-style pots, but I'm not sure how cleanly the water would pour out.
Some of those ceramic decorative "flower basket" planters would be ideal, I think. Just don't seem to be able to find any for a decent price and locally.
I was at the big orange store the other day and saw these in three different sizes. I did do a pour test and these might work, but they'll require some modification.
Still kinda stuck on this fountain issue. By the time I have this sorted and put together it'll be too late in the year to actually put any fish in.
Maybe I should skip the custom fountain and go with a more tried/true waterfall box filter for the time being.
Before I commit to any particular kind of fish I'm going to need a few days of full-tub water levels and temperature measurements while we still have some warm days in the calendar. Someone at a fish forum pointed out that mixing the water like I plan to do will also eliminate any temperature gradient and could make it too hot in the summer sun for the kind of fish I want to keep. So I'll hose it up and just chuck in a powerhead for the time being to see if that's going to be an issue for me.
So managing the thermals of the water is still a concern, especially if I plan to keep stream-loving fish. Another fishkeeper said he had trouble keeping his alive when the temperature of the tank regularly exceeded 80F with the mixing; he didn't have this problem with a slackwater tank outdoors. The mixing of the pumps will eliminate any thermal gradient which might make it too hot for the fish in the summer. At the same time, the fish I'm looking to keep need some current and oxygenation to stay healthy (since that's what streams do).
I had always planned to put up some kind of facade so it's not just "plastic tub full of fish on a patio." Originally I was thinking of dry-stacking landscape blocks (the kinds people build garden borders and low retaining walls out of), but now I'm thinking of making it out of raised-bed garden materials. Some stacking blocks that hold planks of direct-contact 2x6 wood planks between them. Between this facade and the tank itself I would put some layers of foam insulation board. The tank would also be raised slightly off the patio to keep heat from transferring up into it from below. I still want to cut at 15x15 inch viewing window in front so the facade will have to have a gap to accommodate this, but I doubt it would be a significant factor given how low and pinched-in the window would be. Might actually contribute to keeping it warm in the winter with the sun is low and shining in more directly.
This should minimize conductive heating and radiant heating from every direction except directly above (sunlight and ambient air). Even in June the tank is only in direct sunlight for a couple of hours a day. Add in a little shading from the marginal planting and some evaporative losses from the waterfall/filter and it might just keep the temps bearable. But I won't know without the measurements, so that's what I'm working on right now.
Wheels, you can get sculptural quite easily with the spray foam and build up faux rock facade with insukataivr foam, cut it with a knife or saw to make some rock like facets and then seal the foam under fiberglass, or even simply paint it. It will shrink if left without a composite shell but it’ll still insulate quite well. Messy operation, especially if you’re dabbling the PU foam around with fingers so wear PPE.
I considered it since I've seen people make terrain out of the stuff before, but in all honesty I'd rather be able to break this down and a big wooden box around it will look absolutely fine. I even considered sculpting a naturalistic-looking multi-tier fountain out of foam, like a 3D wall-board with vinyl gutters for water channels and big cheap wall planter pots to form pools underneath the foam facade, but decided that would be too much.
If I go ahead and stick with a more modular approach right now, like those raised bed planks and brackets, I can always add stuff like that later on.
So right now I've got it almost filled completely (filled it before going to bed over several nights since I didn't want to tax our pumped well by doing it all at once) and I have a relatively small aquarium powerhead churning the water around. I plan to let it sit for a few days and then start recording the temperature at various times to see if/how it changes and compare it to ambient temps. This will be worst case just-the-bare-tank scenarios as a baseline.
The drawback is that September suddenly decided to not be summer anymore around the equinox, so I don't know how many representative hot days we're going to have for a while. Meanwhilst, I'm rounding up the hardware needed for the viewing window portion. Did some test fitting at the hardware store yesterday. Just grabbed a convenient size bolt and started fitting washers around it to make sure I'm not completely off in the clouds here.
Decided to go with neoprene washers with a 3/16" Inner Diameter so the bolt really wedges into it, and probably 1.25" OD, paired with stainless steel washers of the same OD but with 1/4" ID and some 1/4-20 bolts to secure the panel and gasket. The plan is to do a multi-layer sandwich of bolt -> steel washer -> rubber washer -> acrylic panel -> rubber gasket -> tank wall -> rubber washer -> steel washer -> nut from inside to outside. So each bolt will get two rubber washers and two stainless washers. Unfortunately the hardware wasn't available in stainless at the store, just zinc plated, which I don't want for this application.
I may smear some silicone on the inner wall of the tank before putting it all together, but since it doesn't bond well to LDPE I can't rely on it as a sealant, more as just an extra bit of gap filler between the tank wall and the gasket. I might even dip the actual bolts in Plasti-Dip before threading them in, just to be sure (PD is pond-safe when cured).
Yeah, I'd make sure to get some stainless steel for anything that's going in/near the tank. Just order from McMaster, should be pretty quick, especially since now you know what you want.
What about using some silicone caulk around the hole/bolt/washer just before you tighten it down completely? Then wipe the excess and I'd think you should be good between that and the rubber washers.
Your fountain idea might also serve somewhat as an evaporative cooler. You could lean into that design even more if you needed to.
Was it the early 2000s when were people were making evaporative coolers for watercooling their PCs? Back when getting a radiator for a PC meant going to the auto parts store.
50-60% relative humidity is common in summer which makes it an absolute beast of a season for nearly five months out of the year, so yeah. The exact time of year I'd need evaporative cooling to work it wouldn't be doing much.
Believe me, I have considered it. Especially since my original plan was to use terracotta vessels as part of the fountain; I could have gotten away with just not sealing them inside so that their porous structure wicked small amounts of water away into the air.
But because of issues making the fountain I wanted happen, I'm putting it on the backburner for now and I'll probably just go with a small, conventional pond waterfall/filter combo. One of the benefits to making this out of pieces I can easily tear down is that I can also change things up in the future, if I can get my hands on the kind of things I was looking for.
Wheels, the suggestion might be too late, but if you have any acrylic/acrylic interfaces then you can use methylene chloride to chemically weld the separate pieces into a single unit.
Update: waiting on rubber washers and cap nuts as well as my waterfall parts to arrive, still need to find some pedestals to arrange the fountain parts onto.
I gave up trying to find suitable terracotta bowls for the fountain idea, and am going to go with two or three molded HDPE bedpan-lookin' spillways in the same arrangement instead. In order to hide how ugly they look, I'll probably try to sculpt some Great Stuff into a fake "rock bowl" disguises for each of them, and then paint it to look like cement or something. I thought about using hypertufa to sculpt around the liners instead, but honestly I'm not willing to wait the week or more it'll take for that to fully harden.
Got my specialty bolts and washers (super-duper passivated inert 316 stainless to take zero chances, but honestly regular 18-8/304 would be perfectly fine in all likelihood). The steel washers were slightly thinner than I expected (about 19 to the inch instead of 16) but that shouldn't throw things off too much. I penciled out the fractional-inch dimensions of a fully-loaded window assembly (1" bolt, washer, neoprene washer, acrylic, tank wall, neoprene washer, washer, cap nut) twice to make double-sure I was ordering the right parts, and honestly even with the very slight tolerances afforded by the thinner washers it should still leave enough margin. If the stack of layers ends up being too thin to use the cap nuts as-is, well, I can probably add some jam nuts just before them.
Meanwhile, I'm just logging some data about how the temperature changes throughout the day. Got an air thermometer for the general patio area, a floating aquarium thermometer for the upper levels, and a sinking pool thermometer for the lower levels. I checked the two aquatic thermometers and they both read within 1 degree of each other in jars of hot and cold water, so they're pretty well-matched. So far I haven't noticed any real temperature gradient in different depths. Even though daytime air temps are getting into the mid-70s (F) and then dipping down to the mid-50s at night, the water is staying between 59-65 all day long.
The whole thing about making this pond work as envisioned is that the water should stay below 80F even in high summer. If not I'll have to change some things pretty significantly, starting with the fish species.
Very minor update. Bought some jam nuts. Stacking up some washers to simulate the thickness of tank wall, acrylic window, and gasket made it clear I wouldn't be able to tighten down the fasteners enough to seal it. See below:
So yeah, still some slop even with the cap nut tightened all the way down. 5/32" jam nuts going in before the cap nuts should fix it. (Surprisingly?) I was able to get a better deal from McMaster-Carr on better steel (more 316 stainless) than I could from a lesser grade of steel jam nuts from any of the local places, even with shipping. Got here fast, too!
So the plan to help insulate the tank from potentially hot cement patio during the summer involves lifting it a few inches up to allow air to circulate below it. But the full tank with all water, hardscape, etc. will be around half a ton. Rather than just sit it on some 2x4s, I figured a wheeled base would be good in case I ever needed to move it while full/semi-full of water for whatever reason.
I bought a couple of steel and polypropylene caster dollies today. The floor of the tank is approximately 45" x 30", with big rounded ends on the long sides instead of rectangular corners. Each dolly measures 18" x 30" and is rated for 1000lbs. Shoving the two of them up side by side gives a platform 36" x 30". And they raise the tank up by 5.25".
Obviously there's going to be some overhang at either end. So I'll probably space them out such that there's a smaller gap at either end and a slight gap in the middle. I'm debating whether I need to lay something like a long sheet of acrylic across them to bridge the two and offer some kind of support at the ends, or if I'm overthinking things. The concern is that with a thousand pounds of water, if it's not evenly supported and sags in places it might damage the tank over time.
I'm still going to have some plants for this pond, but they'll mostly be what's called "emergent." Roots in the water or waterlogged substrate, stems and leaves growing up into the air. In pond terms these are often classified as "marginal" plants 'cos they grow at, y'know, the margins of a body of water.
Taking the DIY approach to this too, I walked out onto a lake bed that's been dry for a couple of months and dug up a couple of public domain plants, including one of my favorites. The pointy-grass-lookin' think is spike rush, and the ones with arrowhead-shaped leaves are called clubfoot. Nah just kidding, they're called arrowheads! Also got rescued divots of moss that the deer habitually kick up from our field.
Spent some time yesterday transplanting the marginals into individual 6" pots with a 50/50 mixture of potting soil and composted manure, because that's what I had on hand. I then moved them to a sunnier location and set each pot into a pot liner full of water. That way they stay wet, and if they start to run low on water I can just dump some directly into the pot liner and let it soak up into the soil gradually. I also used the moss patches as a kind of mulch just to make sure their roots are nice and covered after the transplanting.
I want to let them grow out as much as possible before they go dormant for the winter. They weren't getting a lot of direct sun at the pond location so I moved them down to the field where they can get sun for about six to seven hours a day. Hopefully the arrowheads will have time to grow some tubers to ride out the cold season. If they survive, I'll put them in the big 24" planter set on the back wall of the tank, maybe have a couple growing out of smaller clay pots in the filter spillway basins.
Even though my big terracotta waterfall fountain idea was a bust, I'm still trying to find ways of working terracotta pots into the overall design. It's like the black of gardening: terracotta just works with everything.
Anyway, I checked on my row of plants in their grow-out setups today after a rain shower (okay, DURING a rain shower; I was already in the driveway anyhow). They're already looking better than when they were crowded into the plastic tubs.
For more plantings once the pond is established I'd like to try and focus on native, local, water-friendly wildflowers to attract pollinators (and if some bugs happen to fall to the surface of the hungry fish tank, so much the better). The Sagittaria has its own three-petaled white blooms but they're not super colorful or large.
(But spotting a few stalks of them is how I thought to look down and notice the arrowheads growing in the mud in the first place so.. mission accomplished?)
Some things I definitely want to incorporate are cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis) and common jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), both of which I've seen in the wild. The jewelweed grows really tall and bushy, though (I've walked past patches of it that were easily five feet tall) so it might have to go in its own little planter beside the pond, or maybe around the cascading fountain feature. The cardinal flower can go into the rear immersed planter box along with the arrowhead and spikerush.
Another I'd like to try is pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) if I can find a spot for it. We also have some iris species to choose from, like Dwarf Crested Iris (Iris cristata) but they mostly look alike to each other.
I've also seen big growths of some kind of primrose-willow plants (Ludwigia spp.) growing in local ditches and creeks. The genus is really popular as a completely submerged aquatic plant, might be something to experiment with. They have thick reddish stems, small leaves that are either lanceolate or spoon-shaped depending on how much water it's growing in, and four-petaled yellow flowers so they might add some much-needed color variation and textural interest if I can coax them into growing somewhere.
A patch of the stuff growing in a paved creek in town, and a close-up of a cut stem:
Wiki for the typical flowers:
I had the passing thought to include some plantings of hardy, carnivorous bog plants like purple pitcher or a sundew, but I don't think they'd get enough sun or the right water parameters to really thrive.
I've been logging the temperature of the water in the tank several times daily for the last week and a half to see how that much water behaves in a patio tank with a little current (provided by the aquarium pump I'm using as a stand-in for the pond fountain pump to mix the water throughout the levels). Got a floating aquarium thermometer, a sinking pool thermometer, and a no-contact IR thermometer and they're all without about a degree of each other. The water stays around 58F at night when it can be in the high 40s ambient, and rarely gets up to 65F during the day, when the weather's been hovering between 70F and 80F lately.
On a whim, I took my IR thermometer with me today to check a local creek that I got to often to watch the same kind of fish I'd like to keep. The ambient temp was in the low 72s, the ground up the bank was reading about 75F, but the water in the creek was right at 64F. A good sign, if I can keep it close to what they're swimming it year-round!
(Wheels Of Confusion is not responsible for sudden cat attacks when the red pointer dot appears on your monitor.)
While taking those readings in the field... I told myself I wouldn't do it, but I ended up dipping my phone in the drink a few times to sneak some footage of those little yellowfins (Notropis lutipinnis) because of a dearth of self-control. So here's about 42 seconds of that from today! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhHGtZIwMiI
And while I'm digging around, here's some footage from back in July of the river/bluehead chubs (not sure which, just sure they're Nocomis spp.) chilling out in their natural habitat. https://youtu.be/iST8UpvyDB0?t=42
The North American Native Fishes Association has a very brief page for captive care on Nocomis chub species. My biggest wish with this project is to create a suitable stream habitat in this tank to get something like this (not my footage): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cycwjaBQ6Ks
(More videos are around, some by much better videographers; look for things like "notropis spawning" or "bluehead chub building nest")
Yes, those are the exact same species as the fishes in my videos. In spring and early summer the male chubs develop large, blue (or pink for river chub) heads with a crown of horn-like growths and then build large spawning nests out of river pebbles, and yellowfin shiners (as well as a dozen other Notropis shiner species) will only spawn in those same nests. Neither species will get these full breeding colors unless the chubs build a nest first. In fact, chubs like these are crucial ecosystem engineers and a keystone species for rivers all over the eastern US.
So that's my ultimate goal. Even if spawning doesn't happen successfully, I'd at least like to try and see them color up over a fresh-built nest if I can swing it. The key will be keeping the tank parameters favorable, including less than 80F water temperatures in the hot months.
Won't be a lot of progress for the next little while. Going to basically just be logging temperatures, checking on plants, and waiting for my pre-formed basins to arrive (should be one week from now). Going to get as many days of temperature data as possible before draining the tank and cutting in the window.
I plan to have at least one of something like these in tank itself:
Maybe two: one in the back left corner pointing right, and one in the front right corner just under the waterfall return.
Dividing the front third from the back third of the tank footprint will be the transparent acrylic sheet, supported upright by some PVC pipe framework that I really should get started on at some point. So I'll have an invisible window to keep front and back flow separate and help ensure areas of different current strength (the narrower section in the front, right next to the outer window, should create higher flow than the broader back section).
(Edit: I should reiterate that I haven't kept any fish at all since I was a teen, and this project was originally just supposed to be a slackwater tub full of a jillion aquatic plants so it wouldn't have hardly any powered filters or other complications. But things happen: not enough light for the deep water plants, the fish I want to keep changed, etc. Still, what I'm going for strikes my interest WAY more than yet another boring tub of the same old goldfish and lily pads that are so pervasive in home ponds so I think the end result will be worth all the hassle if I can make it pan out.)
Oy, never fails! Buy some hardware at full price, and next week it's on sale. :facepalm: Oh well, I'll take the $5 off anyway.
Decided that I needed 3 dollies instead of just 2 as a platform for the tank. Seemed like trying to spread half a ton over a pair of separated dollies was just asking for trouble. I did a preliminary test of lashing my two existing dollies together to make sure I had my dimensions right, and to see if their casters would bind or interfere with each other when zip-tied and moved around in unison. Fortunately, they presented no clearance issues! So when I'm ready to mount the tank on the three of these I'll also zip-tie them all together into a single platform of 54"x30". The ~1000 pound weight of the full tank should be more than enough to keep them together, but why take chances?
I went back to Harbor Freight to buy the 3rd dolly at $29.99 instead of the normal $34.99 (compared to $49.98 each at Lowe's). Wish I'd waited to buy the first two and saved even more, but either way I'm still getting them relatively cheap.
I did some more measurements and made sure I could cover all the gaps with some twin-wall (corrugaged) polycarbonate sheets. I bought two 24"x36" sheets a few days ago, and if I trim the long side down to 22.5" then the two of them, taped into a single 48"x22.5" panel, will neatly span the middle of the three dollies between the rubber grip sections. That should provide just a skosh more support between the bracing (since all the plastic ribs in the sheets run in the long direction, and it'll fill the places on the dollies where there's no rubber to support the tank) and a little more insulation from below.
Test fits and measurements:
Most of the wild plants I potted up are doing well, except one arrowhead that's withering away and another that's not getting much new growth. The rest seem to appreciate their new water-logged pots and sunny location, and are nicely perking up. Hopefully they can start putting energy into forming tubers to get through the winter. I may need to give them a little boost with some fertilizer for that to happen. And hey, if things keep going south I can just buy some from a garden center with pond plants. One of the benefits of having super-common choices.
Plants in their sunny spot:
My pre-formed waterfall streamlets arrived! I used to think that nothing could stick to HDPE, but whatever schmutz they put on the shipping labels is damn near tenacious as a barnacle! I may have to work the leftover bits with some Goo Gone, which I was hoping to avoid so as to not risk contaminating them with any cleaners.
I had the idea of putting a 6" terracotta pot in or or two of them to see about hydroponically growing more plants in the little basins, and surrounding the pots with the filtering chunks of lava rock. The pots are about the right size, so we'll see if that's something I decide to go with in the final build.
Laying out and taking measurements of the waterfall forms (the scale is a yardstick, about ~91 centimeters):
I'll try to get around to flipping them upside down, covering them with some Great Stuff foam, sculpting it, and painting it to look like rock or cement or something. Just to keep from having a bunch of irregular, thin plastic tubs out in the open. But right now the hardest thing is trying to find suitable stands for them at the different heights I'll want to put them at.
We had a warm spell with 3 days of high-70s/low-80s temperatures, which may be the last one get get for the season. So I'll start putting all my temp data into a spreadsheet to see what the air vs. water temps look like. Then I'll drain the tank and clean it up to start installing the viewing window.
*edit* Forgot to mention, it's been a few weeks with the tank full of water. I've been dilligent about scooping out fallen leaves and bugs and such, but there's still some mulm collecting at the bottom of the tank. The good news is that despite this build-up, I haven't had any algae problems so far. No greenish tint to the water and only a very, very thin coating of transparent slick biofilm on the surfaces. This bodes well for the prospect of clear water once the pond is completed, adequately filtered, planted, and housing fish.
I really don't want to expose these expensive pieces of HDPE that took weeks to arrive to acetone, the stuff you put plastic into when you want to make plastic slurry.
I do have some 91% isopropyl though.
I really don't want to expose these expensive pieces of HDPE that took weeks to arrive to acetone, the stuff you put plastic into when you want to make plastic slurry.
I do have some 91% isopropyl though.
Did some light work today. Cut down my two twin-wall sheets to the right size. No pictures because that's boring, but I did test fit them across all three dollies and they both slot snugly in-between the rubber grip sections. So all I have to do with the tank stand is lash the dollies together with zip ties, tape the sheets end-to-end, and lay the sheets across the middle. I'll save that for later when I'm ready to finalize the layout and placement of the pond itself.
Cut my first gasket. 1/16th inch thick neoprene rubber, 18x18 inches outer perimeter, 15x15 inner perimeter. The inner perimeter is the more crucial one to me because I don't want it to show noticeable excess through the viewing port. Because the sheet wasn't cut perfectly square at the factory I did have to go back and make an adjustment to one of my markings but no biggie. I just used a steel ruler, a drafting T-square, and my trusty acrylic paint marker for laying the cut lines out. Cut them out with a razor utility knife that had a fresh blade (used an old blade to cut the twin-wall since that's not as tough on the edge as rubber is). Oh, and I put them on top of the off-cuts from the twin-wall sheets to keep my knife tip from digging into the table.
I still have another 18x18 square of rubber leftover in case I need to redo it. For that matter I also have another 18x18 sheet of acrylic for the same reason.
Need to go around the piece of acrylic and mark the holes to drill, next.
Then I can drain and clean the tank, mark a 15x15" section and cut that out, and use the acrylic sheet as a guide to pre-drill the holes in there too. After that it's a matter of putting in the various washers and fasteners and testing for leaks. Would be a good time to put together the stand and set the tank on it, while I'm at it. I think making sure the drilled holes align and keep the neoprene sheet flat and even all around will be the hardest parts. I might look into using a leather hole punch tool for the neoprene gasket's bolt holes, probably sized 3/16ths or even 1/8th for a tight seal.
I have done nothing but teleport bread log temperatures for 3 days weeks. It's been up and down lately and other stuff means I haven't really stopped to disassemble the tank and cut in that window. That changes soon! I'm draining it, cleaning it, and will attempt to cut the window out in a short while.
I'll also have to digitize all those temperature measurements and find a neat way to graph them. Anyone know a good, free way to do graphs? I was thinking of some visualization like a drum that you can cycle through; each stop on the drum has daily temps as measured at different times and with different methods (2 water thermometers, no-contact IR thermometer, and 2 air thermometers for ambient temps, logged 2-4 times a day).
I already suspect this patio pond might get too warm for the specific, local minnows I'd like to keep. I'm already looking at alternatives that can take a little more heat in the summer.
The full tank did, in the course of weeks, finally develop a slight greenwater problem. But only after the leaves started coming down and dumping nutrients into the water. So that's good to know!
Also, the plants I harvested from a lakebed? Not doing so great. And I've brought their pots indoors since it's now getting below freezing at night on the regular. The other day I set them up in an empty glass aquarium with one of my DIY light fixtures on a roughly 18-hour timer (trying to compensate for the lack of intensity with sheer duration). I'm no gardener, and I'm not an expert in these plants, but I think they require a winter dormancy period. However, the ones I got were so small and so late in the season that I'm not sure if they managed to grow tubers that could survive all winter. On the other hand, I also don't know if they can go WITHOUT a genuine cold season either. They range into Florida, but this isn't Florida and maybe the local population doesn't do well if kept warm and lit all winter? Who knows! Seriously, if you know someone who knows please point them at this thread so they can tell me.
Grafana tends to be popular. I think you need to provide your own data store on it. But I think Influx/TSDB is often used as the data store underneath it. I haven't messed with TSDB, although I should.
I have a horticulture certificate, which doesn't make me an expert on anything. The most important thing I've learned is that there's a tremendous amount of horticultural knowledge available online but trying to generalize from a few facts is useless. Is that Sagittaria latifolia? It sure looks like it to me. But there are many species/subspecies. Which is yours? You say you harvested it from a lakeside. But you want it to live in a one-directional current. To help it adapt to that, you put it in a pot.
I think I was pretty up-front that I don't really know what I'm doing WRT the plants. And right now all the Sagittaria has melted away so it may be a bit of a moot point. One pot had mold, the others still don't. I'm keeping those watered just in case. There are weeds growing out of them right now. Did they all die? Did they just die back to go dormant? Will I find viable tubers sprouting later in the year? I don't know. It was something I wanted to try and get some experience from.
Whatever you do, do NOT introduce ducks to your pond. I don't think there's any filter I know of that can handle the amount of "sediment" ducks add to a pond.
I think I was pretty up-front that I don't really know what I'm doing WRT the plants. And right now all the Sagittaria has melted away so it may be a bit of a moot point. One pot had mold, the others still don't. I'm keeping those watered just in case. There are weeds growing out of them right now. Did they all die? Did they just die back to go dormant? Will I find viable tubers sprouting later in the year? I don't know. It was something I wanted to try and get some experience from.
Dude, if you want to grow live plants, that means you are a gardener. If you are a gardener, you can get a lot of info on a lot of plants from other gardeners and horticultural sites. I don't know anything specific about arrowheads.
At the same time, plants don't disappear when they go dormant. Yours are dead. But go ahead and look through the soil for tubers before you throw it away. If there are some, you might be able to propagate from them. The first step in this is admitting that you are a gardener.
What I said was kind of harsh. And it occurs to me that you may not see how ambitious your project is from my perspective. I haven't attempted anything like it as a novice gardener. I also don't personally know anybody more expert who has taken plants from the wild and turned them domestic in the way that you seek to.
So far, 2 out of six are growing back after a season indoors, in a dry aquarium tank, under light timers.
After the arrowheads died back, the wild bog weeds from the lake soil took over.
I was pretty sure none of the desired Sagittaria made it, but I didn't chuck them out. I kept watering when I remembered to. One pot molded over recently so that's probably a goner.
But today I noticed a nice little 3-4" arrowhead poking through the foliage of an unwanted jungle.
And closer examination in a second pot revealed another.
So I moved all the pots out of the tank, trimmed some of the weeds, and set them out on the patio in the rain. We're not projected to have any more freezes overnight for the next week at least, so we'll see what comes of them.
I figure these two either DID successfully get a tuber going and are growing back from that, or else were seeds in the lake soil I picked up with the originals and are new sprouts.
My spikerush is also hanging in, though it has died back a lot.
As for the actual pond build, with winter over it seems like a good time to get back into that. Next project is going to be cutting the viewing window and testing that for leaks.
FYI they make aquatic plant fertilizer pellets so you can keep the nutrients close to the roots underwater. That can be useful in limited soil situations or when you have lots of summer evaporation and have to keep adding city water (i.e. stripped of many useful plant nutrients).
Finally marking the cut-out for the acrylic window I want to install. Using a speed square and an 18-inch ruler, which just so happens to be the size of my acrylic panels! I marked the 18" outer perimeter, marked the 15" inner perimeter that's going to be cut out, and then marked the mid-line between the two where I'm going to drill 44 holes for the bolts to squeeze everything together hopefully water-tight.
The actual cutting and drilling will have to way until it's light out again.
The tub and the tools:
Marking the lines:
The finished layout:
Testing that the washers will all fit:
Drilling the stock tank itself isn't that intimidating. I'm not looking forward to drilling all the holes in the actual acrylic, though. I have one spare panel in case I screw it up.
For cutting out the window from the side of the tank, I have a manual plastic cutting/scoring tool but I think these walls are about 5-8mm thick, which is a bit much to ask of those things. So I might score out the lines to cut, then drill some starter holes near the corners and switch to a fine-toothed saw blade if necessary.
Back when I occasionally got to work in a real shop I learned that Windex is great lube for machining plastics like acrylic. Tap drilling too if you're having heat problems (and sharp drills). As in tap the press down for a brief cut and bring it back up. Harder to employ by hand though. A sacrificial backing board durring drilling can help with chipping the far side as well.
I'll keep that in mind when it's time to drill the acrylic. I don't have a press, so this is going to be all by hand. Probably use my step bit after drilling a very tiny {1/8th"?) pilot hole.
The side of the tank is all cut and drilled. Drilling was easy peasey. LDPE offers little difficulty. Holes went through quick and clean. I used at 5/16ths bit to give myself just a little extra room to account for any unevenness for when I put the 1/4" holes in the actual acrylic panel. Tolerances, you might say.
Now cutting out the window, that was a batch and a half.
I started by scoring the lines with my plastic scoring tool.
At first, I tried drilling some access holes with a step bit and then going in with a 24-tooth-per-inch saw blade. It wasn't great. The soft plastic kept snagging and fouling the blade.
I also couldn't get my blade to straighten out and cut cleanly after plunging it in from a predrilled hole in the corner.
So I resorted to brute-force gouging the cuts with the plastic scoring knife. It actually worked pretty well, if slowly. Had to stop a few times and file the blade to keep it reasonably sharp.
Eventually, I could score all the way through in some places. When that was the case, I switched back to the saw blade and cut the much, MUCH thinner remainder (and had a nice pre-scored line to follow, too).
Then I pulled and smoothed off as many of the ragged plastic burs as possible by hand before going to my razor knife and shaving the inside edges down a bit. Just giving them a very light bevel on the inside and out worked fine, with a little extra shaving on the middle. Wanted to make sure there's nothing poking up to interfere with the rubber gasket I'm going to install.
Speaking of the gasket, I need to punch out some holes for the bolts to pass through. I bought a leather punch tool from Michael's this evening, hopefully that works on 1/16th inch thick neoprene material. Since my bolts have a threading diameter of 0.25 inches, which is about 6.2mm, I'll use the 4.8mm size punch. That should leave the hole just large enough to stretch around the bolt tightly.
I did a test-punch and the leather punch gizmo I bought will, in fact, pierce the neoprene rubber gasket and produce a usable, if tight, hole that my bolts can fit through. I did it on an off-cut just to be sure, before I commit the gasket I already cut out last year.
Combined with the also smaller-than-thread-diameter rubber washers I'm using and it may obviate the need to use any sealing compounds, which wouldn't adhere to either plastic very well.
But I went ahead and bought a tube of GE Silicone I anyway. Silicone I/1/One, which has no anti-fungal additives, is fish-safe and has long been used in building custom aquaria. Don't buy Silicone II if you're going to use it with animals!
If I have to use this stuff, I suspect it'll be from water creeping through the bolt threads past all the layers of rubber. That'll be frustrating to troubleshoot, though, since it'll entail un-fastening the window, applying the goop, re-fastening the window, and refilling a hundred+ gallon tub while watching for errant droplets of water.
Hopefully that won't be a problem. But at this point, I've already made sure that the tub won't hold any water ever again without a good window seal.
While at the hardware store, I also picked up a bolt of non-woven polypropylene landscaping fabric. I'm going to use it to line the inside of my in-pond planter box, and any pots I decide to add in to the filter fountain. I verified that it is, in fact, water permeable via the kitchen sink test. So hopefully this will allow the pond water to seep in, but keep my planting substrate from seeping out.
That's just a normal 24" long, self-watering planter box, with the bottom drip tray removed. The fabric came in a convenient 3' x 50' size, so it was already the proper width to simply line the inside of the box from one side to the other. Cutting it to 18" gave a perfect fit. The liner will be filled with substrate and the box itself will sit on a PVC pipe shelf that will also support the current-isolating clear acrylic panel near the middle of the tank that will separate it into front and back flows.
For planting substrate, I'm thinking of using pre-composted manure or organic topsoil mixed with a generous amount of local creek sand (sterilized first), a bit of native iron-rich clay for better cation exchange, and maybe a handful of oyster-based chicken grit for calcium and magnesium supplementation. Most bog, marginal, or fully aquatic plants don't need hard water, but the mineral carbonates don't actually HURT them either.
Gonna try for some taller plants for the planting box, and maybe a few smaller plants in terra cotta pots for the cascading filter/fountain basins.
You could always dip your screws in a dixie cup of silicone before installing them - the same way one might for antisieze or thread lock. Or molten paraffin. Either the wax or silicone would gum up (in a good way) when attaching the nut. The wax wouldn't be time sensitive at install, but could melt out if you ever have the black surface in the sun if there's no water as a heat sink.
Also, let me know if my compulsion to give unsolicited advice is crimping on your build log. I'm used to hearing "stop being an engineer for a moment and let me do my thing." And by "hearing" I mean the special glance my wife has condensed that entire conversation into
The window is in! I've got about 6 inches of water, or 1/3rd of the way up to the overflow holes I drilled, sitting in it. Don't want to deplete the household well too much filling it in one day.
Drilling and lining up the holes in the acrylic was as much of a chore as I feared it would be. In fact I tried my best and still didn't get it totally right.
My first approach was to line up the rubber gasket I'd already cut and mark the drilled holes from the tank onto it as a template, then punch those out and use them as a mask to mark the holes to drill in the acrylic. I make registration marks on one corner of the gasket and of the acrylic so I'd know which corner goes in the upper right and hopefully keep everything aligned.
I used a small diameter drill bit (with the drill set to low speed) to make a divot in the proper spots, and then used my stair-step bit to drill the "final" holes through the acrylic. (Those aren't cracks in the image below, just drill ribbons)
At first I drilled 1/4" holes, which just barely allowed my bolts to slip through easily. But when I did a test fit with a few bolts and the tank, the holes in the acrylic and tank wall didn't align.
So I went back and re-bored the holes in the acrylic to be 5/16" to give me a wider tolerance. It still didn't quite fit, so I widened the holes in the tank wall to 3/8", which still didn't quite get me there. 7/16" just did the job and I managed to fit all the bolts through both the tank wall and acrylic. I called it quits for the day.
This is the fastening hardware I picked to use: flanged button head screw, 1.25" washer with 0.25" inner diameter, and half-height hex nuts (jam nuts), all in 316 stainless steel for maximum corrosion resistance and a slightly reduced chromium content. Sandwiched against the steel washers and the plastic parts are these 1/16" thick neoprene washers, same size as the steel ones but with a 3/16" inner diameter to hug the bolt threads and act as their own gasket. The actual cut gasket goes between the acrylic and the tank walls. This way everything fits tightly against layers of rubber, reducing stress and clamping together to form a seal. (If I were starting over again I would pick a 1/8" thick neoprene sheet for the cut gasket for a slightly thicker seal, and put a third rubber gasket in the fastener lineup between the flange of the bolt and the steel washer for the inside face of the tank.)
Came back to it yesterday afternoon, wiping down the sides of the window in the tank wall to clean them and peeling the film off the acrylic. I pre-loaded all my bolts through 1) a steel washer against the flange, 2) a rubber washer between the steel one and the acrylic, 3) the acrylic window, 4) the cut casket. This gave me a window panel ready to mount and tighten down.
The tank wall is a little warped, so I knew the bolts need some shoring-up to keep it tight against the acrylic window panel. They would all be under a lot of strain, not only keeping the window panel flush against the pre-warped tank wall framing it, but also to pull everything water-tight.
I started applying jam nuts to the bolts... only to be stopped by some faulty jam nuts. After too many false starts, I went inside and tested them. 1 of my 2 boxes (50 nuts each) had a failure rate of nearly 33%. They just would not thread down the bolts at all, binding up almost immediately. Fortunately the second box was entirely good, and I'd bought way more than I needed anyway just in case.
This morning I went back out, finished putting on all the rubber and steel washers, and finger-tightened all the jam nuts to gently pull the tank wall and acrylic panel together. Then I went around with my hex key and ratchet, gently tightening them down initially.
I knew that over-tightening would crack the acrylic pretty quick. I also knew that tightening all the bolts in a row would take stress off of any single bolt, so I could go back after they were all "tight" and gently torque each one a little more, then go around again and torque them a little more, lather and repeat.
Eventually I was happy with their level of tightitude, so I got the garden hose and started the initial fill for a leak test.
So the first row of bolts and a couple more going up the sides of the window are submerged, and I did spot a slow leak at the bottom. I dabbed it with a paper towel, let it sit for an hour, and came back to it. Still seeping, very slightly but visibly wet.
I fiddled with the jam nut, noticed that tightening it would turn the entire bolt, so I immobilized it with an Allen wrench from the inside and tightened the nut a little more. I'll come back to it later in the day and see how it's doing. I'll fill it up gradually over the next couple of days, looking for leaks as I go. It'll be easier to spot them and track them down if the entire tank isn't filled at once. We're also supposed to get some rainy days starting tomorrow, which will be a good stress test and should give me an indicator of how quick it can fill up to the overflow holes I drilled out.
If all goes well, I won't need to take this apart and try using silicone caulk to and seal it up. I keep saying this but it's important: silicone doesn't adhere to the plastics in this, so the rubber gasket and washers will be doing the majority of the sealing.
If it survives the full leak test, I'll go back and cover the exposed bolt threads with some stainless steel cap nuts and start assembling the pond proper; mounting it on my caster dollies, building the exterior wall, putting together the planter box and tank divider frame, and finally moving on the cascading waterfall/filter feature. I've got the PVC fittings needed to build the divider/planter frame, just need more PVC pipe to fit together.
As of yesterday, I didn't see any more water beading up around the bottom seal after tightening that one bolt.
I planned to keep filling it and checking around the seal at each step for more leaks.
But so far, over the last couple of days the tank has accumulated about 3 inches of rain. So I won't be able to verify "rain, or leak?" until the weather takes a turn. On the plus side, free water!
Still waiting for the weather to calm down a bit, but more rain was dumped. I only filled the pond with about 6.5 inches of water on Day 1. By Day 3 it had 11.5 inches.
I added a little more yesterday and checked the seals again today. Still dry at the new level! Looks like my gasket is doing its job perfectly, and I didn't need to use any sealant. Tomorrow is top-up day to see if the last row of bolts needs any tightening before I call it good.
Next phase: Filtration and water flow. I have plans, and modified plans.
The modification is that I'm going to incorporate a great big tub as a dedicated bog filter, which will then flow down into my three cascading waterfall basins as mini-bog filters before returning to the stock tank.
So what's bog filter, and what's MY bog filter specifically? A bog filter is a separate pool into which pond water is pumped. It's typically filled with loose rock and live plants, which will both sequester nitrogenous wastes so that the fish get clean water without constantly inhaling their own urine.
Here's someone else's representative example:
In my case, I'm using a great big 12-gallon resin planter shaped decoratively like a half-barrel. This is actually big enough to be a viable mini-pond with live fish all on its own, but here I'm dedicating it to filtration duty. I needed something with a volume approximately 10% of the main tank.
The plan is to pipe water from the pond up through one of two bulkheads in the bottom of the tub. One will be connected to a spigot, to flush water out of the bottom of the tub for periodic cleanings. The other will be an inlet, to bring water in to be filtered. Into the inlet pipe, I'll screw in a threaded-to-slip PVC pipe adapter. So the unthreaded side of the adapter will project upwards from the bulkhead into the tub. Here I'm just checking where the bulkheads can go without interfering with each other:
A slip-fit tee will be screwed securely to the inside bottom of a cleaned-out coffee creamer canister. Into this tee will be cemented a short length of unthreaded pipe, longer than the canister is tall. A hole in the lid of the canister will allow this bit of pipe to stick out. The canister will be drilled around the "top" near the lid, filled with cheap plastic scrub pads to act as mechanical filtration, then the lid screwed on with the pipe sticking out. The whole thing will then be inverted so the closed filter canister can be press-fit into the adapter attached to the bulkhead. That's stage 1 filtration.
Just a rough lay-out, not a representation of the final assembly:
Water flows in from the pipe through lid side, up through the pipe to the tee, then downward through a pile of pot scrubbers, and finally out of the canister through holes drilled around the "top". The whole thing will be shoved into the adapter shown at left, jutting up from the bulkhead at the bottom of the tub, and positioned upside-down so the canister bottom is the top of the filter. I'm pretty sure there will be enough room on top to put a plant basket or pot that can be removed easily when it's time to clean the canister media.
Surrounding the canister inside the larger whiskey barrel tub will be a column of plastic canvas, AKA that stuff you used for cross-stitching in crafting class. I'll use nylon thread so it won't biodegrade and cause the column to fly apart. It'll form a wall to keep the lava rock out, and let me remove/replace the filter canister easily without disturbing the rocks.
On the outside of the plastic canvas screen will be piled a few bags of lava rock, which are porous and will house legions of nitrogen-processing bacteria. A final layer of fine gravel will cap it off. Into the rim of the tub will be drilled a hole through which to plumb an outflow tube, letting the water flow out of the filter. I'm still designing the outflow but it will probably be a 1-2" inner diameber PVC pipe with an elbow as a downspout, maybe covered in decorative fish-safe Krylon Fusion paint in a metallic scheme to hide how very, very plastic it is.
The tub's outflow tube will be the highest part of the filter system. From there, it will flow down successively through my three pre-formed waterfall basins, each supported on their own plant stand and lifted up in step-wise fashion by successive layers of paver tiles to graduate their height. The basins will also be filled with lava rock, and I have a few terra cotta orchid pots that fit nicely in the middle of each, just in case I want to put more bog plants in these too. In order to hide their plastic nature, I plan to build up a outer facade of spray foam around each basin, and make it look like rough-hewn bowl of cement or stone with paint or Plasti-Dip applications.
I'm still working on parting out the tiles, bricks, and any other materials to raise them up, but I have the planter stands picked out. One will hold the bog filter itself and three the waterfall basins. This works out well because the lattice in the "bottom" of the planter stand is large enough to allow my plumbing through. The basins weren't stable on top of the planters until I set in an overturned 10" terracotta pot dish to act as a level surface for them to sit on.
(The extension cord is just to temporarily run the pond pump for circulation to keep this from becoming a skeeter nursery until the stock tank is drained and set up for its final fill.)
So that's where I'm at as of tonight. Soon I'll cut out the holes for the bulkheads and install those, with their respective plumbing hardware, and I'll work on prettying up the waterfall basins and figuring out the best way to raise them up 5 inches plus a few inches each so they're the right level for the pond. I'll also lash the 3 blue dolly carts together and lay in the corrugated plastic sheets across their middle when the tank is fully leak-tested and ready to be drained and placed in its final configuration.
This is what happens when you don't plan ahead and wing it.
On the bog filter:
1) Need to wait on a Uniseal grommet to arrive in the mail. Should be here next week, probably. Based on the hole saw size requirements I went with a 1"-compatible Uniseal and 1" schedule 40 PVC for the outflow. Gonna bore out a hole in the molded "band" around the top of the barrel tub, pop in the Uniseal, and then a short length of PVC pipe with a 90 degree elbow on the end. Gonna paint the pipe bit a dark bronze color so it's not just a stark white pipe sticking out. But this will be the major hold-up for further assembly and testing of the filter.
2) Instead of my (already purchased) hardware store nylon barb fitting adapter and a separate PVC check valve for the the inlet to prevent back-flow, I'm ordering a one-piece barb adapter with a built-in check valve. THAT should be here within 2 days.
3) I hate when the website says "We've got that color and finish of Krylon Fusion in stock!" and they don't when you get there. Went from Ace to Walmart and finally wound up getting it at Lowe's, driving all over town in the process. At least for Ace I was able to pick up some sand at a good price.
4) I bought 150 pounds of lava rock. Hopefully that'll be enough. Also bought some larger "pond pebbles" to line the bottom of the bog tub with, to let water flow up/down more easily and be flushed more readily when I do a flush-out.
5) Found what I think is the optimal size plastic canvas to stitch together for that canister/lava rock barrier. It should be pretty simple to sew 4 panels of it together into a double-layer cylinder.
Other stuff:
1) I'm cutting sections of PVC to assemble my in-pond plant stand and tank divider. Can already tell I'm gonna need more. Sucks not having a vehicle that can carry 10-foot sections of pipe because the price difference between 2, 5, and 10 foot lengths is negligible. Bastards are marking up the convenience factor! Speaking of cutting PVC, I'm gonna need a bigger cutter for the 1" pipe because my portable screw-clamp-style cutting tool won't fit around it. Wish I knew that before spending 2 hours hopping around town today.
2) I took my pond pump to test-fit the hose to the adapters I bought and as soon as I took the intake cover off, the impeller shaft snapped. D'oh! Since I registered the product for warranty replacement I called them first, but they won't have any replacements in stock to ship for another month at least. So I did as they recommended and took the pump back to the blue retail store and exchanged it for credit, then bought another one (of course, the price was $3 higher than when I bought the original, bastards!).
3) Can I just say that I hate having to go to four different hardware stores in-town to get the stuff I can, and then still have to buy a bunch of materials online?
4) Worried that I'm waiting too long into the year to get this put together and planted. It'll probably be summer before it's done. I should have been doing more work during the "winter" season back in February and March.
5) Still need to foam-up those waterfall basins and start getting them painted too. Plenty to keep me busy for the next week while waiting on parts.
6) Had the pond filled all week, up to the overflow holes. It hasn't leaked anything through the window and the water level has only fallen millimeters, even with all my faffing about in terms of pumps and measurements and such. I think it's gonna work out!
7) Several windy days in a row made it a mess of swirling leaves and oak catkins. Several daily scoopins' needed to clear it out. Hope having tall plants in the back of it will reduce the amount of debris blowing into the tank from behind when it's all set up.
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