[MUSIC]
So, we have the pond completely rocked in, however, I've left a couple of notches in
the coping stone along the destination spot for placement of the underwater lights.
I want to take a couple of minutes to talk about underwater lights because
I think they're really critical to your pond and your ultimate enjoyment.
If you've done your homework right and you've placed this pond in your landscape correctly,
you should be able to see this from the interior of your home,
whether it be your bedroom, the kitchen, the family room, maybe the dining room.
Either way, you should be able to be inside the house, look out into your landscape,
see a beautiful backlit waterfall.
See that the pond glowing, see the shadows of the fish moving around.
It's just a really really cool time.
And so, I think underwater lights are super super important.
I'm gonna take the time and show you a couple installation tricks,
proper placement of where they should be to get you the biggest bang for your dollar.
So we have our fixture here, want you to take a look at it, it's a nice metal fixture,
it's heavy duty.
I have these four screws in here that help hold this.
It's not just one that tightens up and, the,
the plastic ones I find sometimes they'll, they'll get warm and they'll cool and
then they'll start to warp a little bit, and you'll get a seal.
What I like this metal fixture right here is I can bolt these things down and
have a nice tight seal, and they're not gonna start to, you know,
move back and forth when they heat and cool.
So one trick I want to show you is, here's a little contractor secret.
This is our lighting installation box, and everything in this box is what I use for
sealing.
I have screwdrivers, wire connectors.
I have a silicon O-ring lubricant that I'm gonna put on this guy.
So, let me show you what I do in here.
This is an MR16 bulb that I have installed in here, and
this fixture's great because it can handle.
The 20 watt bulb, 35 watt bulb, and even a 50 watt bulb.
And, so it's kind of neat when you have different
wattage's of bulbs inside the, the feature.
So, if you're gonna put a deep, deep fixture down there,
you might wanna use a 50 watt bulb, so it has better casting through the pond.
We'll open up this guy, and I'll show you the rubber seal that's in here.
And then I'll use the silicone grease that I put on here.
I'll show you how we do it.
To help keep a long last, long long lifespan on the, the O-ring.
Pop these guys out.
Okay, so there's a gasket that makes it water tight.
And a lot of times, you don't have to do this for the first year but
we do it right off the get go.
We'll just get a little O-ring lubricant on here,
[COUGH], it keeps that all moist for long life span.
You don't need a lot, just a little bit on there.
Okay, so I got that.
[SOUND]
A little MR16 bulb, snaps right in here.
[SOUND] And, it's, it's, nice and tight right there.
I'll take this guy And we'll bolt it back up.
So the light's held in there real firm.
[SOUND] O-ring's been lubricated.
It's really important, you don't necessarily have to do it all from the get go, but
if you're in say your second and third year in the pond.
And your changing bulbs, I would highly recommend getting
that O-ring lubricant to moisten the O-ring.
So this guy's good to go.
Just takes a couple seconds to do.
Now before I put these in the, into the coping stones.
I wanna show you a little trick we do.
[COUGH] If you put this underwater like this sometimes it's hard to get that
bolt out cause you fish this wire all through the, all through the rock work.
So what we'll do is before we fish it through, I'll come in and
I'll put a couple a wraps on here.
Two or three wraps like this, and then I'll tuck this down in the water and
I'll fish the excess wire back through the rock work and have it come out.
So this'll be tucked in the rock, and in the event that you need to change a bulb,
you can just pop it loose, give a couple swirls, pull it above water level.
And then you can do the maintenance on the bulb without draining the pond.
If you'll notice this crevice right here,
I've reserved this when we were rocking in the pond for one of our underwater lights.
It's at about eight inches depth of water, and as just another reminder,
we'll spin a couple loops of wire right here for
maintenance, future maintenance of the, of the light.
And then, what we'll do is we will set this down, and
we're gonna fish the wire right through the rock work here.
We wanna disguise this guy, put a little rock around here.
[SOUND] Now
one other cool little trick that I do right here,
is I will squirt a little bit of underwater water I mean waterfall foam
on the underwater light and it kind of pins it into place and locks it.
When the fish get big sometimes it will kind of knock the light around.
So it's nice if you have just a little bit of foam in here to lock them in place.
You don't need a lot [SOUND] But that kinda locks it in.
[COUGH] It can be a little bit of a pain when it's time to change the lightbulb,
but you only have to do it about once a year and
if you use LED lightbulbs which are available, you can go even longer.
And then, I'll usually just throw a little construction dust on that,
let it harden off, and you won't see that fixture when
the water comes against it, that one's ready.
[SOUND] Bless you, Billy Jean.
So we got our underwater lights installed in the pond.
I didn't, I didn't install the waterfall lights yet,
of course, because I didn't build a waterfall yet.
But it's important to get these underwater lights installed at this point so
we can carry on with our work.
And I think we covered it pretty well.
if you have any questions, of course, I want you to post them in the comment section,
I'll get to each and every one of them.
I'm Eric Triplett, The Pond Digger, thanks for watching.
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