Pondmaster said,"Thanks! I guess I will use it, just cure it first." I don't know what you mean by "curing it first"? The cement will "cure", meaning "set-up", over a period of time. Anywhere from minutes to a few hours. That is when the solvent in the cement become inert and should be harmless to you and your fish. Check the instructions on the can, it should state the "cure time" there. Wear a mask when you apply any heavy solvent cement, as it can leave you with a very bad headache and also the vapours are extremely bad to inhale into your body. Gary, good question. I don't know if PVC cement would work on EPDM liner. I have a can of it in my shop and I'll try it out on a scrap piece of liner. I tend to think it would not be that easy? There has to be something in the cement that "bites" into the materials being glued together. "Horton"

jclimber, I've have a setup very similar to what you are talking about though my pond is only half the size, still large for an ornamental pond with goldfish. I have a Savio Skimmer with two pumps, one goes to a rapids effect at a small, small stream that feeds in under the biofilter fall, and, the other one pumps into the biofilter. I also have an upper pool and a lower pool separated by a wide but short water fall. The Savio Skimmer (full size) is located at the other end of the lower pool from the waterfall. My two magdrive pumps work fine. Laguna brand 3900 waterfall pumps. That all said, I would take ccoombs advice, no doubt. The number one problem with my pond is keeping the detritus and other junk off the bottom. In fact, you never can keep it off the bottom. The detritus is so fine that you only stir-it up if you get in to clean the pond. So my advice would be to go with the bottom drain setup but still use a skimmer box for the top floating stuff. Thanks for the btm drn link, ccoombs; I hadn't seen that... and thanks for the explanation of the bottom drain (not for draining, necessarily) because when I first heard about BDs that what I thought for sometime! I like the suggestions for saving money. If you can afford the time, better to make your own... esp. underlayment; I actually think old carpet (go dumpster diving at a carpet store) is superior to the underlayments I've laid hands on. Here's another suggestion: I'd get the rock out. It would be one thing if they were in the water atop the liner, but rolling liner up over them is just taking up space. Plus, you could use those big ones to help landscape at the edge. So it occurred to me when you talked about getting an electrician to bring a circuit out to the pond that this electrician is going to have to pay someone to trench. Most places are under the National Electric Code and that means burying the cable 30" or more... they're going to want to use a trencher. If you're going to have to get a trencher in for that you could save by getting a mini-excavator (rental from any tool/equip rental shop) and have it equipped with multiple bucket sizes... most come with options. get a slender bucket for the trench work, wider bucket for the rock. If an excavator can't lift the rock it should be able to beat on it enough to crack it smaller and scoop it out... of course, you could just pay someone to remove the large rocks. Whatever you decide make sure you have 'em mark the area for underground utilities. I really like your setup though. You never did say if you planned to have fish, what kind? Is that a german sheppard!? He/She will love the pond!

I hate to post a photo because the pond doesn't have its liner yet. It is looking pretty rough right now because we have been inundated with rain for the past week or so and have not been able to do squat with the pond. When we stacked the cement bags, we did not remove the bags because until it rained on the bags the cement inside was still loose. So, now with all this rain the bags are disintegrating and they look awful. At least we now can see the cement underneath and, yes, I think it will look like gray fieldstone once the wrappings are off. But right now? Sort of hideous, in my opinion. But I PROMISE to post photos when -- or IF -- we can ever get back out there and do some more work, hideous or not. You will at least get an idea of what it is going to look like when finished. Gary -- I think my stones will have rounded edges. We plan to go shopping for them next week as our pool 'advisor' has told us of a great place to find them. I sure hope it gets hot again because the EPDM is going to be pretty stiff as we try to position it into the bottom of the pond. So, naturally, I'm hoping for a short heat wave!

A plank across the pond can make it easier to search awkward places, saving a dunk in the water ahah, remembered a few more techniques for finding leaks... Let the water level drop below the leak, wait for a very dry period of weather, go look by day and by night for little tiny beads of moisture showing up on dry areas of the liner where soil moisture is moving through small punctures. You can spot pinhole leaks easier when the liner is very dry while the soil behind is quite damp. During Summer, its not unusual to see tiny trails of debris trickling from punctures on a dry liner, ants find every tiny hole convenient for tipping out little particles of excavated soil as they extend their tunneling. Rodents can be an occasional source of leaks, where in hard winters they cannot find water in frozen ground, they tunnel up to the liner and peck through the liner usually in out of sight places, beneath overhanging clumps of grass, folds in the liner... As their holes cause the water levels to drop, they bite new holes at another location lowering the water level further. Where you can look behind the liner will indicate if their are rodents, you might anticipate several leaks along where those tunnels run after a hard freezing Winter. Moles do the tunneling, mice move in and bite at liners