Today we're gonna talk about pond leaks and evaporation,
multi level ponds, and foaming pond water.
[MUSIC]
Okay, the first question today comes from sunny South Africa.
It's from a Willy Swart, and he wants to know about evaporation, and
he knows there's some different variables to
make ponds evaporate more.
And he wants to know, when can he say, hey I have water loss due to
evaporation, or hey, is my pond leaking?
So, we're gonna talk about that.
First off, I want to tell you, do a little did you know.
This is kind of an interesting thing.
If you have really warm water, let's say you have high temperatures and
your water's very warm, and then you have a pop in temperature going cold
from the outdoor ambient temperature, drops very cold.
And you go out to the pond in the morning, and
you see steam rising off the pond.
Really cool look, like the creature of the Black Lagoon's
gonna come out or something.
That is actually heavy evaporation popping off the pond.
And so, a lot of people assume that hey, if it's really hot,
we're gonna have evaporation.
But also, if your warm water and cold night,
you could have evaporation too at certain times of the year.
So I think that's really interesting.
I wanted to share that with you.
But really, let me tell you this.
In sunny Southern California, we're very close to Palm Springs.
The pool industry has very good numbers for
evaporation because it's a big, big industry in California.
And, so they kind of know what to expect from that.
I can tell you that in Palm Springs,
California when its 115, 120, it's not uncommon to lose an inch and
a half to two inches of water in a swimming pool in a day.
When it's just brutally hot like that and very windy, I might add.
Because Palm Springs is a very, very windy area.
So some of those pools have big open bodies with wind coming across them.
They might have a little water feature coming off of a jacuzzi or
something like that.
So that's not uncommon.
To bring that back into the pond world, the same can be applied.
What's different between the pools and the ponds is, the pond,
if it has a water feature via a waterfall coming back into the pond
from the life support system, that waterfall has to run continuous.
Well, in a swimming pool, a lot of times that might only be running
at night time when the water temperature's a little cooler.
So, if you have a very tall waterfall,
a lot of splash activity, that's a lot of evaporation.
Often times, I might talk a client down a little bit if they want
a very large waterfall in a backyard for a couple of reasons.
It might look unnatural, a really tall waterfall in a small,
flat back yard.
But more importantly, a lot of evaporation comes from
that water splashing as it makes the descent.
If you have a very rapid flow, like if you have a trickling style
water fall, like low rain, it's not going to evaporate as much as if you
have water rushing through very fast.
So those are the different variables you might consider.
Of course, wind and the water level splash and so forth.
If you think your pond has a leak,
I want to give you a very brief tutorial on what you should do.
So if you think you're having a leak, and
you're not sure if it's evaporation or not,
you would shut everything off.
Shut off the auto fill, shut off the air pumps,
shut off the life support systems, circulation system.
You're gonna want to shut everything off, and
then you're going to want to go through a 12 hour period And
you wanna see if that water level changes in the pond.
Now, I'm gonna save,
you have to proceed with caution if you have fish.
If you have a lot of fish,
if you're overstocked, this could be problematic.
Especially if the water temperature is very warm, so
we wanna be careful there.
But to give you a scenario,
you can't just throw an air pump in there and just blast the air.
Because I remember doing a leak test on a pond once, and
they had a pretty good fish load.
And I told them to turn everything off but
the air from the bottom drain.
The bottom drain's coming up, a lot of activity on the top of the pond,
and we actually lost a half inch in 12 hours overnight in that pond.
And then, I wasn't really sure.
I actually felt like, hey,
I don't think the ponds leaking, we need to tone that air down.
Because imagine that air is rumbling on the top,
you're getting evaporation from that.
But not only that, if you have the coping stones around the edges of
the pond and the water is turbulent and moving like this,
it's splashing and lapping up against the edges of the pond.
And if it's warm, if that rock is warm,
you're gonna get evaporation that's coming off that rock.
So to try not to make that get too long,
when we turn the air off, turn it way, way down.
Just enough to provide some oxygen for the fish, and
barely bubbling up from the surface.
And we did it at night time,
when the water temperature's cool, the sun is away.
And we lost like an eighth of an inch in that pond overnight.
So the air can make a big difference on if you
think that the pond has a leak.
If you're testing your pond,
I want you to test in the evening for start.
You want to test at eight o'clock at night,
and check it at eight o'clock in the morning with that 12 hour span.
If the temperatures are cool,
even if it's hot, I mean, an eighth of an inch.
If it's really hot, maybe a quarter.
That would be just a very little water loss
in a typical backyard pond.
And then you will know if your pond is leaking or not.
If you shut your pond off overnight with low to no air, no circulation,
no auto-fill, you're losing half inch,
three quarters of an inch to an inch.
You probably have some kind of problem going on in the pond, and
that we'll have to discuss in another episode.
But, that would give you the differences between water loss
through a leak and evaporation.
Okay, that's a great question Willie.
Thank you from South Africa.
That was great.
The next question is from King Siller on YouTube, and
he has a multi level pond.
So when he says that, he means he has an upper pond and a lower pond.
And he wants me to share some of our experiences, so
he can kinda know what's going on with his pond.
I'm assuming it's relatively new to him.
We do this, typically, in new construction,
if you're building an upper pond, lower pond combination,
you don't want the upper pond to be smaller than the lower pond.
What you don't want to do is have a big pond at the top, small pond on
the bottom, when you shut the pond off, there's gonna be a waterfall
most likely coming in from the upper pond into the lower pond.
And the water as it drops in the upper pond might overflow the lower
pond, so you want a lower pond up top, bigger pond at bottom.
That's for starts.
A lot of people put fish in the upper pond and they don't want
the fish to be mingled with the other fish down in the lower pond.
A simple example is goldfish in the top, koi in the bottom.
But you will find that somehow, some way,
some of those fish make it from the top pond down to the lower pond.
I mean, it doesn't happen overnight,
but you can assume that it will happen.
And you might have to catch the goldies out, and
put them back up there for whatever reason.
I have a couple ponds that we do.
One is full of aquatic plants at the top.
A lot of big beautiful water lilies, a lot of marginal aquatic plants,
kind of aids and acts as a filter for the entire pond.
And in the lower pond,
just coping stone and big beautiful koi down there.
So it's kinda neat because we have this garden pond effect at the top,
and this at the bottom pond,
you have very much a koi pond going on down there.
So that's a pretty fun way to look at that.
The upper pond I find we'll usually have a little bit more sediment than
the lower pond, cuz it acts as a settling pool.
You know what I'm saying?
If you're using skimmers and you're pulling everything from the bottom,
you're sending filtration up to the top,
any particulate seems to settle out in that upper pond.
And it seems like the bottom pond has a little bit less particulate
in the cases that I've seen.
But that might be due to heavy aeration in the bottom pond and
so forth,
but that's some of the experiences that I can tell you about that.
It's a very cool look, but
you want to make sure you follow the rules of construction, and
have a smaller pond at the top than the bottom, okay?
We're gonna move on to the last question of the day.
It's from a Brad Harvey, and he has two ponds.
And one pond gets a lot of foam in the pond, and
the other pond doesn't have any foam at all.
He's kind of curious what's going on with the foam and
where's it coming from and why.
If you have foam in the pond, usually it's a, you're gonna
have proteins in the pond, or heavy organics are going on in that pond.
A lot of times it's due to the fish foods that you might be feeding.
But if you have two ponds on the same property,
I assume you're using the same fish food.
But you have to fine tune things.
Let's say they're filtered exactly the same.
Exact same filters, pumps, everything.
You know one pond might have more fish than the other.
One pond might be getting fed twice as much as the other pond.
Maybe you feed both ponds the same, but
maybe your neighbor's throwing food into this pond.
Or your daughter comes out and feeds this pond, but
ignores the other one.
And so, you might be getting twice as much food in there.
Let's say the pump is not quite as strong as the other.
So it's not running through, cycling through filtration.
So you might find there's just more organic In one pond than the other.
And so my question's going to be back to you,
is like, is that one overstocked?
Are you overfeeding it?
Does it have less filtration?
Those are the things I would look at immediately to see what's going on
with the proteins or the stuff that's foaming up in the pond.
A lot of times we'll get phone calls after heavy rain, which we
rarely have here in Southern California/ But we have good rain,
and we'll get some phone calls from clients saying, hey,
I have a lot of foam going on in the pond.
And so, it's usually like the rain pounding on there,
like it somehow makes the foam come up.
One little twist here at the end Is maybe the koi in the pond with
the foam, maybe those koi are sexually mature, and
maybe they're spawning.
And so a lot of times when their spawning you'll see some foam on
the surface as well.
so that's kinda the curveball on there.
Maybe your other pond has smaller fish in there, and
they're not breeding yet.
So, I don't know if it's a breeding habit that you might be
seeing as well.
So there you go with that.
I have a question for you today.
I wanna know, have you ever had a leak in your pond?
I wanna know, how'd you find it?
Where was it?
What caused it?
How you got it fixed?
I know that's a lot of questions, but I think if
you've had an experience with a pond leaking, and you share it with us in
the comment section below, everyone's gonna learn from it.
I hope to learn some stuff from it too, so
please put your leaking experiences in the comment section below.
And if you want me to ask a question specific to you
on the Ask the Pond Digger show, you know how to do it,
#AskThePondDigger, put it on the social media platforms.
I'll do my best to get it answered right here on the show.
Thanks for watching.
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