New Pond

Draining old pond with vacuum.

Our state of the art old drain system. I know you like it. LOL

After about five hours of hard work, the old pond was gone.

The old pond at the end of day one.

Day two of the new pond. The pond was marked out on the ground for digging.

Daniel a day laborer that I got to help me. He's removing all the grass from the area I marked out for the new pond.

The hole from the old pond all cleaned up and now needs to be back filled with dirt.

Removing the top soil from the new pond and adding it to the old pond hole. This took about 15 yards of dirt.

The new pond with about 10" of soil out of it. The new pond will be 7' deep, so we have a LOT more digging. We are only going to dig down 6' and the pond will be raised 1' above ground. That will help on the digging and removal of the dirt.

Now you can get a idea how the pond will be shaped. The pond will be shaped like an 8. The middle will be 10' and the two outer sides will be 12'. The pond will be 24' long and 7' deep.

Well, another day working on the hole for the pond and still not done. I should have listened to my wife! She told me to just hire a company to do the digging on the pond and that's exactly what I should have done. No, it hasn't been that bad, but it has been a lot of work, and by the time I am done, I don't know how much I saved doing it myself. I have only used up about four bottles of ibuprofen to help kill all of the pain at the end of each day (LOL).

This weekend the digging was a little slower. This was due to not having a jackhammer and the hole getting deeper. But we still got over 15 yards of dirt out of the hole in about six hours. One end of the hole is at the 6' where we need it at; the other end is only at about 3'. The day laborers thought the pond was a pool and that they were done digging (NOT).

Here are a few pictures of today's work.

This is the most important part of the whole pond. It is the tree that my wife told me if I kill it, she's killing me. I am hoping that I didn't kill it --- we will see in the Spring.

About two hours into the day.

Two of the hardest working guys I have ever seen. The guy in the white shirt and white hat is 43 years old and has worked circles around the younger guy.

The one end of the pond is at 6' deep. The pond will be elevated one foot above ground level to bring the pond to a depth of 7'.

To this point in the pond I have a total of 107 man hours to dig it. We removed 75 yards of dirt and 10 yards of block and concrete all by hand. The hole needs a little fine tuning to the sides before the plumbing and rebar work starts. I'm guessing another 2 yards of dirt will come out of the hole with that. The hole is 24' long and 10' wide in the middle and 12' wide on each side and 6' deep. The pond will be raised 1' about the ground level.

I am starting to build the form to the elevate part of the pond above ground level. This form will be 1' high to bring the total depth of the pond to 7' deep. 

What you see in the picture is some framing work that is needed to elevate the pond. Once the gunite is sprayed the frame work will be removed. The frame work will be finished this weekend and the inspector from the city will be out next week.

This is a picture of some of the TPR's. I will have four sets of them with two ports to each set. TPR's (Tangential Pond Return): it causes water current in the pond. You will notice that we have two sets on each side. We can make the water flow clockwise or switch the current the opposite direction and make the flow counter clockwise. Some believe that if a fish always swims with current going one way, part of their muscle development is skewed to one side of their body. By switching flow directions you can even both sides of the muscle development. As you can see they are NOT jets. The plumbing is all in 2" piping. 

Some of the pipe work for the skimmers and the TPR's. It all have been ran in 2" PVC pipe, with no shape 90's on it. All the 90's are two 45's put together to make sweeping 90's.

I can't stress how important it is to pressure test ALL the plumbing. I went around and looked at all the plumbing and thought I did glue it all, wow was I wrong. One of the TPR pipes that would have been under the gunite wasn't glued. If I didn't pressure test it, I would be in deep DODO.

Today the guy's from Prestige Steel Inc. came out and did the rebar work. Boy, these guy's were quick and good.

Another picture of them installing the rebar for the pond.

I would like to say thank you to Prestige Steel Inc. for the great job they did on the pond. If you ever need steel work they are the one. They can be contacted at 1 (818) 361-4927.

Well, today was not a good pond day. We had over 6" of rain in about 12 hours today and it messed up everything. Two sides of the pond collapsed and I think more will before it's over. This will be a MAJOR set back for the pond.

Here is a picture from the other side.

As you can see by this picture the pond has about 20" of water in it. We had to rent a pomp to pump the pond out. 

Now that most of the water has been pumped out, Now we have the job of removing all the mud from the pond. Just to give you a idea how much mud was removed. We could have filled eight puck-up truck's full of it. 

Since we were planning on more rain, I had to make a cover for the pond before we had more damage to it. 

Now that the damage has been clean up and fixed, we can get back to work on the pond. In this picture you can see the pond has been fixed and it's ready for the gunite work.

Here they are getting ready for the gunite.

The gunite is sprayed on under pressure. 

Here is another picture of them at work.

They are getting close to being done with the gunite work.

The gunite work is all done, now we have to let the pond cure for about a month before sealing it. As you can see in the picture the pipes for the TPR's. they will be cut off flush with the walls of the pond before seal  the pond.