How to Build a Koi Pond Video - Part 1 by Pondguru

Hello this is Richard from Tyne Valley Aquatics and Pond Guru Landscaping and this is the latest pond that we've done. It's a koi pond in Durham, bottom drain, rendered sides, painted, all of that lot. So I'm going to explain exactly how we built it. It was fairly obvious when I first looked at the job that the small raised pond that was there already could be added to, so I decided to kind of make a similar shape at a lower level than the raised pond. We decided to dig into the ground approximately two feet and have it approximately two foot six-ish above the ground and run the top pond into the bottom pond. Obviously we needed to dig a hole so we dug the hole by hand which took forever because the access was only a wheelbarrow wide around the side of the house so we couldn't get a digger in to dig it unfortunately. The next step was to put a foundation in. So we mixed some concrete and put a foundation in. It was sloping down to the point where we wanted the bottom drain. Are you Korean? Once the foundation was in and hardened off, we built a blockwork wall up on the inside of the pond. Once the blockwork wall was up on the inside of the pond, we then added an outer skin of brick to match the existing brick in the upper pond. Lastly we finished that off with a soldier course of bricks i.e. bricks instead of lying flat they lie on their side along the top that straddled the blocks and also the bricks to tie the two sides together. Obviously we also used wall ties to tie the two together as well. The next step was to render the inside of the pond and for the render the first coat of render we used sand and cement It's a cement mix, lots of plasticizer. Lots of PVA, get it to stick put that on. The second coat of render was render sand with again plasticizer and PVA glue. We painted the first coat of render with a PVA mix first to help the second coat to stick. After the render had hardened we then painted it with two coats of black pond paint from a company called Ask Coatings based in Dorset. Once we had the pond painted That was the actual pond part more or less finished and we could get on with connecting the pipe work to the filter. We used a four inch bottom drain and that led the water from the bottom of the pond into a pipe which then fed into a Nexus 210 filter. We installed a slide valve in the four inch pipe before the Nexus filter so that if anything should happen to the filter, say I don't know someone came in with a sword and stabbed the filter and popped it or something, it could be isolated. The flow coming out of the pond could be shut off completely and the filter could be taken out and repaired and then replaced. At least. Likewise where the outlet of the filter drops down before the pump we put an isolation slide valve in there as well in the two inch pipe so that any problems with the pump or whatever shut the valve off fix the pump open the valve set the pump away again the pump we used was a dry mounted Aquamax 8000 from Oase five year guarantee very very quiet you can't even hear the pump running an excellent pump from the pump The water feeds out through an inch and a half reinforced flexible pipe into an Evo 55 UV filter, which is an ultraviolet filter, which kills algae, also kills parasites and so on and such forth, which obviously makes the water healthier for the fish and hopefully clear so you can see the fish. This particular UV filter actually has a touch, not a touch screen, but a touch sensitive button on the front, so when you put a bulb in You can press the button and that resets the timer as soon as the bulb, the bulb's useful life has passed the light starts to flash and you know it's time to change the bulb. Also the blue indicator light shows you that the bulb is actually working. When that light goes out that means there's a problem with the bulb. when it flashes erratically it also means there's a problem with the bulb investigate so it's quite a good uv reasonably cheap as well um considering it's it's from the company that also manufactured the Nexus filter and Nexus are renowned for being very very expensive filters the uv i think was 135 140 quid or something so quite quite cheap for what they are very well nicely molded the unit as well it looks very nice next to the Nexus on the outlet of the uv we again took the water out through an inch and a half reinforced flexible pipe then we took it into an Oase splitter which has controllable valves on Very, very good unit. I use them on quite a lot of ponds, especially if I'm putting two pressure filters in and I need to put the flow through both filters at the same time, you know, put them in tandem instead of in series. And I used it in this instance to switch the water between the top pond, where it would normally go for 90% of the time, switch it between the top pond and the bottom pond. Anytime really apart from the winter the water would be going Out the bottom drain, through the pipe, through the filter. Into the pump, pumped out through the UV and up to the top pond, through the top pond where the plants are, drop over the spill into the big pond and then repeat that cycle, i.e. it would go through the whole system. In the winter when it's exceptionally cold, by having that splitter in there the flow could be shut off to the top pond and directed into the bottom pond. The Outlet that goes into the bottom pond comes in on the same side as the bottom drain so that the water will just shoot straight down into the bottom drain and circulate a very small area of water and therefore won't disturb the main body of water in the big pond. The top pond, which used to have a liner in, it was pretty... Rough, it wasn't very good. We pulled the liner out and chucked it away. We dug out quite a formal shape and we concreted the bottom in a similar way to we concreted the bottom pond. We then rendered the sides again with two coats, same as we did with the bottom pond. And then we painted it. I fashioned a shape made out of lead. So that was all shaped and hammered into position, tried it in dry first just to check that everything fitted, whipped it out and then we used a sealant all the way around the insides of the shape that I'd cut out in the top pond and once the sealant had gone in... Pushed the lead shape in and gently tapped it in and held it in place with big rocks and bricks just to keep it pressed out against the walls until the sealant had gone off. Once the sealant which was sticking the lead shape to the top pond had gone off we left it two or three days I think Um... we put water in the ponds set it away and then because that shape that we made Was lead, we could alter it to get the water to flow over perfectly, which it pretty much does. There's a nice heavy flow coming over there, which pulls a lot of oxygen in, and the fish that are in there seem to love it. To prevent any splashback, and also to give a little bit more decoration, we cut a channel in underneath where we intended the waterfall to tip over, so we cut a channel in there, and we cut some lead. And set it into the wall, that meant that when the wind blew very hard against the fallen water, it would hit the wall and just run straight back into the pond.