Add on the mechanics to your water garden

Perhaps it is time to add a bit of sparkle to your water garden scene. How about a fountain to give it that eye-catching appeal that demands your attention or the drama and noise of a waterfall or a cascade? Maybe you want to see your fish again and give them a view of their own surroundings by fitting a biological filter system to keep the water clear, cleaner and healthier. Possibly an ultra violet clarifier would help even more, or you might want all four together. Whether its for a new water garden scheme or you want to add them to your existing pool, the choice equipment for whichever purpose can seem a little confusing at first sight, even to those of us familiar with the stuff.

The water garden trade and industry have moved on apace over recent years and some companies have recognised that here is a market that deserves products that have been designed and developed properly. The result is that all these products sped light years ahead into the world of sci-fi, with pumps mimicking mechanical armadillos or the Starship Enterprise and the guts of filters looking like insides of nuclear silos. Furthermore, there is a lot more choice from competitive manufacturers who provide an unending array of sizes and performance of products in all their ranges. Although these products do the same job and more efficiently than they did in the past, many of the same principles involved in their performance will still apply. These are basic guidelines that have always applied to these things and they help you feel confident in buying the appropriate equipment suitable for the task you put it to.

For instance, say you wanted a waterfall coming into a pool and you want that pool to be a stable environment for fish and plants, then you should not recycle more than the total volume of that pool in one hour down that waterfall. Therefore the pump you choose should be capable of delivering the right amount to the prescribed height of your waterfall above the water level of the pool. Half the volume of the pool on a small pool is a convenient amount. It is common sense really, and easy to apply if you know the volume or gallon age of your pool.

Want to know more? You probably know a lot of them already. You will pick up a lot of them on the side of product packaging, but once upon a time these rules were just unwritten canons for the streetwise initiates and you only painfully learnt about them when you dared to confess all your cock-ups at the local water garden product outlet inhabited by zealous workaholics with manic staring eyes and who seem to blow steam out of their noses when they hear what youve done. Well here are some of their secrets, which if they are not common knowledge now, they should be, because they are essential in trying to budget for a scheme.

Estimate the gallonage of your pool.

Gallons = (Length x breadth x depth) all in feet x 6.25

Litres = (Length x breadth x depth) all in metres x 1000

When it comes to pools with informal organic shapes you can only guess at the real volume, so if you are talking about filter performances or waterfall widths it would be best to get something more than adequate that will be still performing sufficiently when pump inlets are partly clogged and the system itself is holding extra volumes of water. So for the large part it is better to slightly overestimate by taking the overall length, breadth and depth

To make a more precise calculation of the volume of the pool that would be useful when doing pool water treatments at a later date, time how long it takes to fill your pool from empty. First you must know how much water your hose delivers in what time. If you measure this when the hose is turned full on, see how long it takes to fill a two-gallon or 10litre bucket. Then time how long it takes to fill the pool. Divide the time it takes to fill the bucket into the time it takes to fill the pool and then multiply by the number gallons or litres that the bucket holds.

You can use the same method to calculate the amount of water coming out of a filter or down a waterfall, but instead you catch the water coming out of the unit or waterfall in the bucket. To calculate the amount of water per hour, divide the minutes it takes to fill the bucket into 60 and multiply by the volume, be it litres or gallons.

When you have calculated that figure you can calculate how much water gets lost in the system, whether its your waterfall/stream and or your filter system, when you turn the water on. Sometimes the water level in the pool can drop by several inches if the stream is too big. Turn the pump on and time from that moment until the water starts to return to the pool. Using the figure from the above calculation you can easily work out how much water it takes to get the stream/filter and waterfalls overflowing. The resulting figure is in fact an underestimate as there is a backlog of water that builds up over several minutes. So if you turn the system off you will find that there is a volume of water that continues a certain time after the volume in your calculation has run through. You would be quite surprised at the volume of water that just seems to disappear.