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Retirement and forum shutdown (17 Jan 2022)

Hi,

John Howell who has managed the forum for years is getting on and wishes to retire from the role of managing it.
Over the years, he has managed the forum through good days and bad days and he has always been fair.
He has managed to bring his passion for fish keeping to the forum and keep it going for so long.

I wish to thank John for his hard work in keeping the forum going.

With John wishing to "retire" from the role of managing the forum and the forum receiving very little traffic, I think we must agree that forum has come to a natural conclusion and it's time to put it to rest.

I am proposing that the forum be made read-only from March 2022 onwards and that no new users or content be created. The website is still registered for several more years, so the content will still be accessible but no new topics or replies will be allowed.

If there is interest from the ITFS or other fish keeping clubs, we may redirect traffic to them or to a Facebook group but will not actively manage it.

I'd like to thank everyone over the years who helped with forum, posted a reply, started a new topic, ask a question and helped a newbie in fish keeping. And thank you to the sponsors who helped us along the away. Hopefully it made the hobby stronger.

I'd especially like to thank John Howell and Valerie Rousseau for all of their contributions, without them the forum would have never been has successful.

Thank you
Darragh Sherwin

So, we're making the pond bigger. . .

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01 Apr 2012 08:47 #1 by Barb (Barbara)
Hey! So I have a few n00b questions, because up until now I've just been keeping fish with the unhelpful advice of pet shops and it hasn't really done me much good so far.

First off, we're in the middle of making our pond a lot bigger. At the moment it's about six foot long, but it's only about three foot deep. We only discovered after it was all finished and stocked that it should be about twice that for the winter. Luckily, we didn't lose any fish over the winter, but as we'd like to get some bigger koi (and I have my heart set on a couple of sturgeon) we've decided to make it bigger. We started by digging a hole about two foot away from the pond. The hole is at the moment four and a half foot deep and about four foot long. We're hoping to make it six foot deep and then break the wall of dirt between it and the current pond to make them into a single larger one.

Now we come to the first problem; where to put the fish when we break it into one? We were thinking just fill up the bath and bring them up in buckets until the pond is ready again, but I'm sort of reluctant to catch them in nets and put them through that because despite having them near enough to two years, they've only recently started coming up straight away to be fed and it took so long to get them like that.

Then, there's the liner for the pond. We put old carpet under our last liner, so we've got the under bit sorted. But actually buying the liner - it's so expensive! Especially for the size we'd need for the pond once it's done. Does anyone know the cheapest place to get a good liner? We've looked online and everything, but nothing near where we could afford right now. The same goes for filters...could you maybe tell me what size filter we'd need for a pond roughly eleven foot long and up to six foot deep in one end?

And (final question, I swear!) could anybody - ANYBODY! - please give us a hand with how to build a mini water fall into the pond? We've been searching for ages online about how to build one, what way to dig the pond so that it will dip a little at the edge and the water will just flow in, but I'm at a loss for how to properly describe what we want for an accurate google search, and nothing we've found so far is particularly useful in terms of how you'd go about building one. I'd really appreciate any help on this one, because we've nearly finished digging out the pond now.

Sorry for all the questions (in my first real post, too) but I've just built up so many from working on this on my own so long! Thanks :)

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01 Apr 2012 09:37 #2 by joemc (joe mc)
good luck with the pond build, just be careful that the soil between the existing pond and new pond does not collapse or burst with the pressure from the water, keep an eye on it or maybe reduce the level of the water in the existing pond if you think it is a worry.
re the pond liner, you get what you pay for, from the cheap shot term plastic liners to the top quality firestone butyl rubbers and right up to the HDPE liners.
depending on what liner you already have will decide on how or if you can join them, another option would be to just reline the whole area as a whole with a nw liner.
butyl liner is a good choice for lining ponds, long lasting, easy to work with, easy to join and easy to repair if you damage it.
another thing to be aware of when digging out a pond is safety, you don't want a side wall colapsing on yourself or anyone else in the hole, earth is heavy and if it comes down on you . well you have a serious problem, do not work in a deep hole on your own, do not work in a deep hole without propper shuttering if the sides are any way steep.
re the water fall, draw out what you would like to achieve, then work out how t build the structure to give the effect you have drawn, remember to over exaggerate the waterfall pools as once you build them you are stuck with them and it is easy to reduce the volume of water they can hold, but not increase it!
thats all the advice i can think of off hand from your post.... good luck with the pond, stick up a few pics, that is always worth a thousand words
regards
joe mc

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01 Apr 2012 11:08 #3 by Barb (Barbara)
Thanks a million for that! I was just out this morning doing a water change because we're overrun with bitty algae that's making it hard to see the fish. My brother was saying to be careful about the pressure breaking the wall in between them, so we've left the side nearest the pond a good bit thicker than the rest until we're ready.

Great idea about just drawing what we're trying ot achieve with the waterfall, and aiming to exaggerate - good point. We're due to finish up digging deeper today, seeing as the weather is nice, and then we get back to business with shopping for liners and pumps. :)

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