Peter May unravels the secret in installing pond liners

Others liners look

Liners are the most cost effective method of making a waterproof pool in your garden, but what is there really to choose between all the makes and materials? Peter May tells you what will help you make it neat or natural.

Rolls of pool liner ready for retail choose to buy off the roll if possible. It is much cheaper. So tailor your pool size to suit a standard width off the roll.

Dont you hate all those fancy scientific names and acronyms; those strings of letters that only mean anything to them thats in the know. Somehow you feel excluded from all the information. But then again all you are after is to make a hole in the ground waterproof. You have already vaguely contemplated going au naturelle by puddling it in clay, but then there was the mess.

And then you thought of manufacturing the pool itself in concrete, but a few sums quickly made you realise not only the muck and disruption involved but also the expense. So then you continue your investigations down the aquatic centre and find a huge range of products that all have different names but all look pretty much the same: black, some are shiny, some are not. Admittedly some are rigid and already pool shaped. They will tell you these are made from HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) or ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) and those are also fibreglass mostly bigger heavier pools.

A small pool and stream made from what seemed a quite large rigid plastic liner. You can see how easily it can get lost in a large garden.

Some liners look like sheets of plastic, whilst others look like rubber

Its here you discover all these exotic names like Pondalene, Aqualast, Maxipool or possibly Alfafol. Despite the variety of brand names most of the liners available are one of several quite distinctly different materials that will all do the same job, and as individual materials they only come from 2 and 3 factories around the world. So it is highly likely that products, or at least the raw materials, with similar specifications will have come from the same factories in America, Belgium or Sweden. So what are the characteristics of pond liner materials and how do they perform in certain situations?

Basically anything is possible with flexible liners. It is just a matter of affording one that is up to the job. Douglas Knight at Tatton Park Flower Show 2003.

The flexible sheets of material are either PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride) or Polyethylene those are the shiny ones and matt coloured ones are EPDM rubber (Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomar) or Butyl rubber. Well as your eyes are glazing over and you feel no the wiser, you still arent finding the choice any easier. Once upon a time that choice was much easier. THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD OF RIGID POOLS