Water Gardening: Do you have or recommend a BOTTOM DRAIN in your pond?, 1 by fredrump

fredrump wrote:
I guess I should issue a progress report. I purchased a new Sequel Showa pump to see if there is any difference between it and my year old Sequence 7800 pumps. In the meantime I had sent one 7800 to http://www.thepondsolution.com/ (the Pond Solution in Delray Beach, FL) to have it checked out. I kept getting lesser and lesser flow with it. These folks had installed and sold this "solution" to me but now claimed that service was not part of the deal. They also claimed that the pump was fine but that I had damaged the impeller with rocks. How rocks can get to it thru the strainer basket is beyond my comprehension. In other words, I was on my own as far as warranty goes. While the 7800 was at the shop I used the 6800 pump they had sold me to run my skimmer but never got working. So it just sat there until now.

The Showa arrived and I got more flow but not what I would expect from a new pump. This model comes with two impellers with the low volume one installed. I figure I'll try the high volume and flow got better but still couldn't get enough water to really make a difference. This process sort of proved to me that there was an obstruction of some kind in the bottom drain pipes. Perhaps an accumulation of little stones or muck? I was going to get to the bottom of this and decided that proof of the pudding was a direct feed to that same pump but not via the 2" bottom drains. So I built a 4" filter pipe to set into the water basically over top of my pond wall into the piping system that was burried around it. I dug with a hand shovel around all the various pipes down there to see what went where. Much to my amazement I found the pipe coming up from the bottom of the pond going backwards to a U and then turning around to the pump at least 50 feet away. See the picture below.

The Pond Solution folks had simply capped that pipe (it led to the skimmer too) and installed a new pipe to the skimmer which joins the main draw pipe further down the line in a T. It was obvious that such an extreme U turn plus whatever other 90s and T's were below ground not conducive to good water flow.

The next pic will show how I proved this theory.

Fred


This message was edited May 15, 2008 10:28 AM