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Koi Pond
Alameda is a great place for koi ponds. Our temperate climate
assures for good water temperatures year round. Winter highs
keep the water near 60 during the winter months. Summer fog
keeps the sun off the pond most of the day keeping the water around 70
f during the summer.
The first thing you need to do when building a koi pond is find
yourself a suitable helper. After you find your helper, you
need to look at where you want to put pond. Then you need to
decide how big and what materials to use to make your pond. I
spent a lot of time on the internet searching for solutions to build my
pond. In the end, I decided to build my own design on top of
the drive way out of bricks. Laying bricks looks easy when
you watch them do it on television.. It is not as easy as it
looks. The scary part of learning how to lay bricks while
building a pond is that I was learning while building the base.
I got better as I got closer to the top of the pond.
It has been up for 3 years now with no leaks so I am happy.
Step by step
Site selection is different for every application. If you
look closely the wall where I am building the pond is about to fall
down. The brick pond will help protect the wall. It
is also nice to sit in the sun room and look out at the fish.
I did a quick layout with no motar to verify my design plans.
The layout works great for a pre construction visualization.
I forgot to include mortar expansion on my layout.
In the end it saved me some bricks as I had to construct with
two less bricks per layer.
I read that I had to snap some lines and lay down strings to mark my
construction lines. The string was cemented over within two
bricks and the lines were gone by the fifth brick I used the
wall as a guide on the back side and ran a string about 3 inches away
from the front wall and eyed it for straightness. Needless to
say it is mostly straight, not perfectly straight. The mortar
mix goes fast. If you are not going to paint the outside of
your pond, you have to keep the mortar off the bricks as it is very
difficult to remove after it dries. You can work in one
direction while your helper works the other way. I had
another helper who was camera shy. He was a lot of help.
The pipe sticking out of the side is for the filter.
I was going to make a filter out of bricks but I was so sick
of playing with bricks, I scrapped that idea and went with a plastic
drum.
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Page 2, finishing up.
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