Disappearing waterfalls have become extremely popular, it seems every body wants a touch of nature in their very own backyard.
There's really not a better way to do that then by adding a waterfall to the property,
now what I have behind me is a water feature with multiple terraces and a large elevation change.
What I wanna do is take you back about a week when we started this entire project
and we'll show you some behind the scenes footage of some of the construction process.
Hey I'm Eric Triplett The Pond Digger, we're in Oak Glen California,
and we're building a large disappearing waterfall on this hill side.
We're gonna show you some construction techniques on this big job that you can take home
with you for your very own backyard project. Lets get started.
We're in the waterfalls reservoir and I wanna stress to you the importance
of having a large enough reservoir for the size waterfall that you might be constructing.
Now theres some consequences to having to small of a reservoir and I wanna cover them.
When you first start your system off, all the water thats inside your reservoir will shoot up into
the waterfalls and will hang suspended in there as it makes its way back down into the basin.
Now if you don't have enough water in there your pump's gonna run dry, so you might just think
let me add some more water to the system, and the water will start to fill up,
it will protect the pump so it doesn't die,
then when you go to take out the plug for service and you shut the pump off
all the water thats hanging suspended in the waterfalls will rush back down into the basin
and it'll start to overflow and make your backyard a muddy mess.
Your probably wondering what these are.
This is what we call a Matrix Box,
these guys fit into our basin and give us allot of water volume in a small compact area.
Now there's a right way and a wrong way to install it and I wanna make sure you understand.
This fashion right now is the correct way to put it, it can be either way, this way or that way,
but this inner panel should have an upper panel sitting on top of it, so you get some strength when you put compression on this.
Now if I turned it this way, wrong way, and I made the top panel the side panel,
if I stepped on this area I could compress this plastic in because I don't have any shoring underneath it.
You never want to stand it in an upright fashion,
its not a right way because we don't have any strength right here as well, so be sure that when you go to install them,
you have that inner panel and upper panel stacked right on top of it you get all the strength that way.
Now you probably wondering why I have all these Matrix Boxes sitting on the dirt because of course
the dirt is not gonna hold the water, but this makes our installation real fast when I have a nice level area
and all the Matrix Boxes are sitting in there tight, we'll pull them out once its level will install our underlayment and liner,
for now lets move on to another step.
I wanna take the time to talk to you about excavation,
one of the cool construction techniques that you need to know about is, we over dig our benches.
Now what this allows us to do we can place our stone however we want and we're not constricted by the bench of our excavation.
Now it gives you more creativity and it actually make the job go a little bit faster.
I don't even know what stone I'm gonna place right here so when I find just the right stone in the rock pile
I get to set it into place, I get it how I want it and then I take access soil and I backfill behind the liner.
It makes the project go a hole lot faster and look allot better when its done.
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