How to convert your swimming pool... Part 2The progress continues...
The first picture shows the concrete slab cast for the sole purpose of holding a portable quarantine pond - have we mentioned the importance of quarantining your fish anywhere?!? Of course we have two Koi holding ponds on this site as well, so the quarantine pond can also double up as a medication pond if needed. The second picture shows the nearly completed swimming pool now Koi pond. You will notice that it is very difficult to insert piping at an angle for the pond water returns making it tricky to cut them flush with the surface which would have been ideal. So the protruding pipes with elbows on them is a compromise. The bottom drain installation is covered in more detail below as it is a critical aspect to success!
This picture shows the installation of an air curtain at the deep end of the pond against the vertical wall. The air curtain is installed normally about at 2/3 of the depth of the pond. It is important to ensure that it is mounted completely horizontally so that the air is evenly distributed. You can see we have used plastic clamps that are fastened into the shell with stainless steel nails. The feed pipe of the right hand side is later plastered over so as to hide it - you can also cut a groove into the shell and plaster over it as well if you prefer. The air curtain is a massively important piece of equipment. It is vital for success and indeed on this pond creates such extremely powerful vertical circulation up along the deep end wall that even without the pumps running debris accumulates around the bottom drains - which is exactly what we want - perfect in fact!
When a picture says a thousand words... Picture 1 shows it all. The bottom drains are laid at the deepest point of the pond and the 110mm piping is plumbed as shown. The pipes are then run through the wall of the shell to the settlement chamber where we saw them sticking up out of the ground with their end caps on in the pictures on the previous page. Cutting through the shell is no easy task but this is infinitely preferable to running the pipes up and over the sides in which case our filtration would have to be a pump fed installation. The one mistake we only realised afterwards was that the piping from the pond to the settlement chamber actually runs slightly down hill which was not noticeable at the time of installation. It doesn't sound like much but what happens is that one gets an air lock the first time the system is used! The implications are that the air lock has to first be cleared before the drains start to 'pull' like they should.
In this picture we can see how the drains have now been concreted into the pond. We have lost some pond volume as a result but not really all that much. Also we have accentuated the slopes of the sides of the pond creating as close to the near perfect 'half watermelon' shape as possible.
Two more pictures detailing the bottom drain installation. Looks messy! But then what building site is ever not messy?!
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