This makes me happy.
This makes me happy.
- Jonathan
- aka "Berko"
Jonathan,
I'll give you one for great BBQ in Austin area but TexMex: No Way, been there done that. If you want the best Tex Mex you will have to come to El Paso.!!
I smell those red chicken enchiladas now !
BTW, you should try digging in my clay soil. Ouch!
Carl
Carl Sowell
Any more updates?
Here are some updates. (All these darn pictures are rotated counter clockwise 90 degrees ... thanks iPad posting).
I’ve spent 10 hours the last couple days with a crew of two people jackhammering and digging. The good news is, we’re 90% there. The bad news, we went through limestone and at about 40” of total depth, we hit solid bed rock. So - there’s no option to get deeper, which makes me sad.
I also decided to make a modification due to the bedrock. Originally, I was going to have a bottom drain at each end of the pond (reminder, it’s oval shaped). I’ve called an audible. I’m going to experiment with something. I’m putting both of the drains at one end of the oval and am going to slope down a bit to them. I’ll have three returns ~18” from the bottom on the far end pushing waste towards them. It’s sort of a modified river flow design.
The advantage of this for me is I was able to dramatically reduce the amount of bedrock jackhammering. you can see the holes, beginning of the trenches, and the small opening beneath the collar where I successfully broke through.
I also completed leveling the area for the filter pad.
And I’ve completed the trench for most of the piping to get there / get back to the pond. This picture is a bit old, it’s about 3 inches deeper, vertical walls and totally compacted now.
Last edited by berkokid; 01-30-2019 at 10:07 PM.
- Jonathan
- aka "Berko"
Hers a revised diagram. Please take a look at the three 2” returns I’m planning opposite the bottom drains. Thoughts?
Should I use the angled returns on the sides?
- Jonathan
- aka "Berko"
You need to hold the iPad sideways (landscape) with the home button on the right.
https://www.koiphen.com/forums/showth...s-on-the-forum
Nice job on the forms and collar!
Is your sieve the larger 10k/gph one? You have a lot of pond outflow for a single sieve.
If using a river flow type design I'd move the tpr's so they're all on the far end. On an oval shape I think you
might collect a little debris on the far edges, but some big koi would help keep it flowing to the far end.
I’m not sure I’m going to use the mid water pickup right now. It’s more a safety for future proofing. So I’ll have two bottom drains and the skimmer flow through the sieve. I like your idea for the returns ... that’s a better thought than mine.
- Jonathan
- aka "Berko"
This will be the only chance you have to get the depth. Are you sure you don't want to hire a bob-cat (mini-excavator) with hydraulic breaker (hoe-ram) to take it down further?
Hard to guess the price in your location to have someone come to you, but it probably is about $500??
Only a guess, but it would probably take 30 minutes to 1 hour once he got the machine over the hole to get the depth and shape of the bottom you wanted.
+1 on going deeper as long as pricing are reasonable
I hear you ... but, lurking beneath 12" of limestone .... granite. we hit solid granite. Ain't no mini-excavator with a hoe-ram gonna take that out cost effectively. My neighbor down the street is putting in a pool ... they've got a monster rig in their backyard to get past 4 feet.
I think the only potential for increased depth is to go one more course of cinder block high ... which would get me roughly four feet .... I just don't think there's another reasonable option ... unless I'm missing something.
- Jonathan
- aka "Berko"
Today was filter pad day. 22 bags of 80# ... mixed by hand ... yay. My son helped. At 9, he was a trooper carrying water, and doing some misc tasks for about 6 hours, while playing with his off road remote control truck in the pond and huge piles of dirts. I set a 3/8” rebar grid on 3” chairs prior to pouring the cement. The pad is 5 feet by 9 feet. I’ll be creating a stone wall on the front, and probably just pressure treated lumber on the backside and short side near the corner of the yard. This will make it easy to attach my return distribution manifold, and the electrical, etc.
I think I’m going to get a few bags of the smooth topcoat cement to finish it off.
This shows the trench path to the pond. It’s almost exactly 25 feet away.
- Jonathan
- aka "Berko"
Looks great non the less
Ordered a bunch of pipe to be delivered from Lowe’s, and talked to Steve J. for a short while tonight and ordered the bottom drains, a medo 120 air pump and a couple more flanged returns ...
I ordered the flanged returns because I liked Steve’s (icu2) advice to just roll with the straight flanges given my changes to bottom drain positioning.
The only other thing I’m going to do though, in addition to the three flanged returns, I’m going to plumb the tpr returns in on the sides as well and hook them up through a distribution manifold.
It’s overkill just like my midwater pickup, but this way I’ll have lots of options for tweaking the flow to properly sweep debris towards the bottom drain. It’s short pipe runs with simple 2” and the trenches will already be dug anyway, so I’m really only talking about a hundred bucks extra in pipe to have the option to configure the flow ...
That takes off some of the sting of not getting to 48” of depth .... that’s a lie. It does not do that at all.
- Jonathan
- aka "Berko"