One Year Swimming Pond Update

One year ago I built this swimming pond. I did everything by hand and it's been an incredible experience building it. But what is even better is the experience of swimming in such a beautiful pond. Today it's time for a close look on how it worked and performed during its first year. It will be a very detailed video, so let's dive right in. So what happened during the last year since I built the pond? At first not much. I finished the pond in autumn and there were only a few weeks left for the bubble pumps to do their work until winter arrived. A few months later in April I activated the air compressor again. All the bubble pumps were still working and they started to filter the water in the pond again. After a few days the water has turned incredibly clean. Especially in the morning the pond looks like a clear mountain lake. The water you see here is 1.4 meter deep and you can see every little stone on the bottom. In May the weather finally got warmer and the water in the pond did so too. It reached 20 degrees Celsius in the middle of the month. It was great to have water that warm so early in the season. In June the water plants finally started to grow a lot. The first year is the hardest for a pond like this, because there are not enough plants to compete against algae for nutrients. I planted two types of plants inside the pond. Type one is flowers. These are just here for the aesthetics and do only little cleaning of the water. The other type is water cleaning plants. For this purpose I planted reeds and underwater plants. Luckily all of the plants spread very quickly. By the end of summer almost half of the planting zone was already occupied. Speaking of summer, let's see what happened in July and August. During heat waves the water in the pond reached 25 to 26 degrees at the hottest time of the day. Overnight it cooled down again to 20 to 22 degrees. I was quite relieved when I noticed that the water temperatures did not rise above these levels. I always feared that the pond would get too warm in summer, because it is a very shallow swimming pond. I think one reason for this is that the pond has such a bright color and therefore reflects more energy away. In comparison our second pond, which is our duck pond, has no bubble pumps and no gravel on the bottom. Its appearance is much darker. I'm very happy that the water temperatures have been just perfect for us. Another thing that we really appreciate about our pond is the beach area. I put a lot of thought process into the geometry of this section of the pond. It's such a great place to be and can be used in many different ways. Every kid that visited us loved to play here and even the step into the swimming area of the pond turned out to be a great bench. What is still missing in the beach area is some shade from a tree. The tree I planted last year grew very well, but until it grows into a big tree we have to rely on other forms of shade. One thing that I had to improve in the beach area is the concrete edge into the pond. When I built this edge I was in a hurry and made the mistake that I put the concrete against the sand. The sand got swept away over time and left a sharp edge behind. I also forgot to smooth the concrete surface in between the stones with a brush. To make things better I had to do some more concrete work again. The first step was to lower the water level of the pond. I pumped the into the overflow pipe which directs the water to our second pond. Then I prepared everything for the concrete work. Tools, sand and cement. Things can get messy really fast when working with concrete so I always take the time to prepare everything well. Nonetheless once I started with the concrete work it suddenly rained a bit and I made a small mistake so things got messy anyways. I had no time to film but luckily it still turned out nice. It is much better now. The second thing I improved since I finished building the pond was to install a skimmer. A skimmer removes stuff that floats on the surface of the pond. The bubble pumps can't remove these things as they can only clean the water body not the surface of the water. Before I built the skimmer we had to do a few minutes of surface cleaning by hand every day which got annoying over time. So how does a skimmer work if there's no conventional pump in the pond? The design I came up with looks like this. The skimmer is placed under the jetty because you don't see it there and it is easy to mount. Then a pipe connects to a new bubble pump. This pump consists of two pipes, a smaller one inside a bigger one. So if the air stone accelerates the water in the smaller pipe it draws water into the bigger pipe and therefore into the skimmer. Building this bubble pump was quite fun. I cut some pipes to size, made some holes and installed the air stone. This is what the end result looked like. But before I installed the pump in the pond I first had to prepare the jetty for it and mount the skimmer. I took my circular saw and cut a hole into the jetty. This is what the finished maintenance opening looks like. Then I fixed the skimmer with a piece of wood. After I fixed the bubble pump in place the last step was to connect the small air pipe that supplies the air stone in the pump to the main supply pipe. Then I turned the air compressor back on. The skimmer started working quite well. However, the flow was quite weak. After some observation I realized that the flap of the skimmer was not heavy enough. You see how the flow increases once I put a bit of pressure on the flap. So I mounted a stainless steel rod on it to make it heavier. The skimmer is a great addition to the pond and I'd even say it is a must-have for a pond like this. I collect a handful of dead insects, small algae and other stuff out of the skimmer every day and the surface of the water is really clean all the time now. I'm also happy that I waited with building the skimmer that long because a few months ago I did not yet know how much my son would love to throw stones into the pond. If I wouldn't have placed the pump underneath the jetty it would have been full of stones within a week. For the second part of this video I want to answer some frequently asked questions that I received during the last year. To begin let's start with the question that was asked the most. How much did it all cost? All in all the materials for the pond cost me about 4500 euros in total. Half of it being the liner and the fleece, another 1000 for the wood and 500 for the gravel. The rest was the piping, bolts, the screws and the air compressor. It is very cheap for a pond this size. Which brings me to the second question. What are the dimensions of this pond? The pond is about 12 by 11 meters but I won't go into the details here like the size of the jetty or the wooden wall. Instead I put together a plan that you can download for free. The plan includes a cross-section of the pond with all relevant details. If you want to know how big something is simply select the measuring tool from the adobe reader and measure the things you need. You find the link to the download in the description below. If you appreciate my work and you feel like wanting to leave me a tip you can find a link for that in the description as well. But now back to the next question. How much maintenance does the pond need? The most time-consuming part was the removal of the surface dirt by hand before we had the skimmer. Now it's comparable to maintaining a bed of flowers and herbs. You remove old leaves and flower heads that would otherwise get squishy and cut back the underwater plants that reach the surface. All the plant material that I take out of the pond is used for composting or I mulch it directly onto the vegetable beds. Every now and then I stir up the water to loosen small chunks of dirt so that the skimmer can catch it. Other than that there's not much more to do than emptying the skimmer and cleaning the wooden wall from sediment. Speaking of the wooden wall there have been two questions about it too. Why did I build the wall with wood? Won't it rot quickly? Wood only decays fast if it's moist and in the presence of oxygen. If there's no air it will rot very slowly. In my case the wood is completely submerged in water so I expect the wood to last at least 30 years. The wood that will need replacement first will be the posts of the jetty. These are always moist and in the presence of oxygen. Why does the wooden wall come not afloat? The complete wooden wall consists of one cubic meter of large wood. Large wood is a local very durable and heavy hardwood. One cubic meter of this kind of wood weighs about 700 kilos in dry condition. For it to stay underwater I only need 300 more kilos of ballast for the complete wall. The wooden wall is surrounded by about 20 tons of gravel which is pressing sideways to the wall. Additionally there are bolts and other stuff sticking out of the wall into the gravel. There is no way this wall will ever float up to the surface. Aren't there lots of mosquitoes? No, I haven't ever seen mosquito larvae in the pond. I find way more of them in my rain barrels. Why? Because mosquitoes don't like moving water for their larvae. Additionally the water striders eat mosquito larvae too. Now to the last question. Why didn't I seal the pond with clay? Believe me I tried. And before I built the first pond on the property I thought it will be very easy to build a clay pond. However it turned out that there is not only a lot of clay in the subsoil but unfortunately there are also a lot of old building materials like sand and bricks buried in the subsoil. I tried to seal the pond with clay only but that did not work. Then I tried it with a geosynthetic bentonite clay liner but that did not work either. That's why I gave up on the idea to seal the pond with clay and used the liner instead. But I'm quite happy with my pond journey. I built the same pond three times and learned a way. And I couldn't be more satisfied with the pond we have right now. We use it every day during summer and it still makes me feel proud that I built it all by myself without big machinery. So that's it for this video. If you have some unanswered questions feel free to ask them in the comments. I'll make sure to answer all of them. And if you like this video please consider giving it a like and subscribing to the channel. I'd very much appreciate it. Thanks for watching and see you next time!