Post #809043 by BlackWater on Sun, May 14, 2023 9:42 AM

So far everything had been going to plan. But if I had to summarize the challenges with this project, it would be “It’s all fun and games until you add water.”

First, choosing a pump. How many gallons/liters per hour do I need? I didn’t know. Fortunately they’re all pretty cheap on Amazon for trial and error, unfortunately I glued each one in place and had to rip it out. This caused stress around the water pipe, breaking the seal of epoxy at the bottom of the basin. I finally figured out to clamp the pipes in place instead of gluing them, and found a pump that doesn’t spray water out of the top.

Besides trial and error, a rough estimate would be if a pump says it can do 3 feet of vertical, you’ll get a trickle at the top of those three feet (mine is almost exactly 36”). If it can do more than that, you’ll get a gushing spraying artery up there and all your fountain water will be on the ground. Second, the pumps that say “adjustable” just mean that there’s a plastic thing in front of the inlet that closes, it doesn’t really change the flow very much.

Next issue with water was leaking. I mentioned before that my sand-formed basin wasn’t very deep. You want that to be deep, that’s the reservoir of water that recirculates and you need room for error. I made a second coat of cement and formed that on the sides to increase the basin depth, but this left cracks that epoxy didn’t fill. Regular Epoxy wants to flow down, so it’s not good at filling holes on the sides.

I found some “pond seal” epoxy, which is rubberized. This filled some leaks, especially at the tube that got cracked when I was switching pumps. I got some disposable syringes to squirt into where I thought the leaks were, and I think I’ve fixed them all. I haven’t had the confidence yet to leave it running 24/7 but I think I’m almost there. If I did this again, I would make a plastic basin that wouldn’t leak and design around that.

The only remaining issue is that some water flows over the sides instead of the neat path I made. I sealed the whole thing with stuff you put on a garage floor to make it waterproof, but we’ll see what it looks like in a year.