I built my current ornamental pond some 20+ years ago. I had built a few before but this was the first all concrete pond, at my own house.
There was a tiny little pond built with pvc plastic, left by the previous owners. The location was right outside the family room, which I liked. But there was a 125ft tall fir tree and a 50ft maple right there.
I cut the trees down because they were way too close to the house and did my best to get all the root systems dug out. Then I built this pond and stream. You can see it in my gallery.
But I made some mistakes. Back then, there wasn't a lot of people doing this and there wasn't any web to look stuff up.
I used 6x10 wire mesh to reinforce the concrete and although I used the standoff blocks on the bottom, I did not use them on the sides, or maybe I didn't use enough of them. The other issue was that I did not do a good enough job of lacing the overlapping sections of mesh.
A year or two ago I started to get some leakage out of the pond. I found some cracks near the edge and patched those and thought I was ok. But then it leaked again and just got worse. So this year I drained it all out and cleaned it. Then started chipping away for bad concrete.
As you can see from the photos, there were several bad cracks. I used my pneumatic chisel to break all the weakened concrete out, down to the steel mesh. The concrete was way too thin in some places and the steel mesh was right at the bottom instead of the middle of the pour. The places that cracked were all very thin and occured where the mesh sheets overlapped. I didn't find any wire lacing the sheets together, although I know I did. Apparently not nearly enough!
More posts to follow the progress:
There was a tiny little pond built with pvc plastic, left by the previous owners. The location was right outside the family room, which I liked. But there was a 125ft tall fir tree and a 50ft maple right there.
I cut the trees down because they were way too close to the house and did my best to get all the root systems dug out. Then I built this pond and stream. You can see it in my gallery.
But I made some mistakes. Back then, there wasn't a lot of people doing this and there wasn't any web to look stuff up.
I used 6x10 wire mesh to reinforce the concrete and although I used the standoff blocks on the bottom, I did not use them on the sides, or maybe I didn't use enough of them. The other issue was that I did not do a good enough job of lacing the overlapping sections of mesh.
A year or two ago I started to get some leakage out of the pond. I found some cracks near the edge and patched those and thought I was ok. But then it leaked again and just got worse. So this year I drained it all out and cleaned it. Then started chipping away for bad concrete.
As you can see from the photos, there were several bad cracks. I used my pneumatic chisel to break all the weakened concrete out, down to the steel mesh. The concrete was way too thin in some places and the steel mesh was right at the bottom instead of the middle of the pour. The places that cracked were all very thin and occured where the mesh sheets overlapped. I didn't find any wire lacing the sheets together, although I know I did. Apparently not nearly enough!
More posts to follow the progress:
I needed to rough up some of the first coating anyway...
