How to install a backyard POND in ONE day Steps 1-7

in the next five hours we're gonna put in 11 by 16 pond in here with the waterfall [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we did this and see that timer in the corner we did that in four hours and 28 minutes it's a $9,000 job it was supposed to be a $9,000 job but actually it turned out to be a little bit more like 11,500 because we put a few extra things in it that you wouldn't do in a normal job but either way we're gonna break this thing down for you right now any other gonna be three guys you get working this thing out and you know what we're gonna get it done in one day and show you everything step by step how we do it including the price of materials the price of the kit the pond kit itself how much labor you should anticipate and exactly how to do this so what are we waiting for let's start installing a pond so step one is to mark out your paw I love me can't get to created with the shape decreed you don't have to go with just a circle we've laid out the pond the second step is lay out your filters so this is what you guys are gonna get in your truck it's gonna you can put this right in the back of a f-150 or maybe not a GMC or a Chevy sorry guys had to get that in there I'm just teasing Brian what's great about these pine kits [Music] what isn't great about the pike this is a better question what what's the nice thing about having different size pond kits well the nice thing about it is the flexibility everything that you need for the project comes in one box so all your fittings your silicone and your waterfall foam your piping your pump the biological filter the prefilter everything you need - the rock and gravel is inside this box so when you're doing a job you don't have to second-guess anything you know all the components are going to be there the beauty of it is it gets delivered very quickly and easily to the jobsite easy to move around and because of the range of sizes we could we could price it accordingly so you don't have to run to the store for anything ad last thing we want to do is run to the store because it we're gonna be doing this in six hours so if we lose one of our team members for two hours now all the sudden that shifts everything a guy's going around looking for a little random piece or a part in it completely throws your profits are gone gone this is the other thing this is the other component to it nothing nothing to technical pliers paint the heat gun in case you have a repair have to do a repair man I guess this is for repairs exactly yep ripped PVC cable liners electrical tape so this a couple knife saw setup one bucket for each crew you're good to go plus a couple of three four or five shovels right you got it that's the tool wheelbarrow ball cart is handy as well depending upon the size of the boulders you're gonna be working with but nothing nothing much I mean everything you should be able taking originated or no Dingell over there sorry Toro don't need you for these kinds of jobs the point is we're trying to show that you can do a nine thousand dollar job without high-tech equipment get it done in a single day this kit retail I believe is $1,300 $1,300 you probably got another $700 in boulders Rock and labor for the so we're gonna have rockin boulders total for waterfall for the entire pound and everything we're quite looking about five ton of boulders and then another ton of gravel so a ton of gravel is gonna come 100 square feet 1 inch deep inch and a half deep so with our 11 by 16 foot pound those are the maximum dimensions we're gonna probably have about a hundred square feet of actual flat areas where the gravel is actually gonna go how many boulders on the on the pond this waterfall we need 12 12 in this is going to be 5 tons so we're looking at several pallets of rock now the rock is gonna it's going to be a blend I like to do a blend of 1 2 2 2 1 1 part small two parts medium one part large so that's going to give us that good naturalistic blend well as a six inch to 12 inch okay the medium is 12 to 18 inch 12 to 18 inch boulders are gonna be 200 pounds apiece they're gonna get ten of them per ton the large ones are eighteen to twenty fours those are four to five hundred pounds apiece one ton of those you're gonna get four to five rocks okay all right let's review some of these numbers because this is probably one of the most important parts of this video and I want to make sure we're getting off on a clear understanding now Edie said the package price for the pond kit itself was about 1,300 to 1,500 dollars what I'm gonna do for you right now is find the absolute best price and Link it through dirt monkey so there's going to be a link right below this video you're not gonna find a better price anywhere unless you go right directly to aquascapes website and order through them but you have to be a certified aquascape contractor to get the same price that i think we're gonna try to get for you right at dirt monkey University second thing let's talk about the price per ton of those boulders now Edie has said there's five ton of boulders on this project five tons can vary a lot in price I buy my boulders wholesale for $75 per ton so I'm going to spend about three hundred and twenty-five dollars in boulders for this project but Boulder prices can go all the way up to two hundred and twenty-five dollars per ton so instead of spending three hundred and some dollars for boulders you could end up spending almost $1200 in boulders here's a recommendation I'm going to make two you buy a whole bunch of boulders at the cheapest price you can if you have a yard and stockpile them then sort them out in different sizes and then anytime you have a pond project come up you can go to your yard get the right boulders load them up and haul them out so what we're gonna do is we're gonna blend all those different things together the big boulders are gonna be for the waterfall as well as some of the accents medium boulders are gonna fill the majority then that small rock is going in between everything the reason we do that is we want that naturalistic look if you did a pun completely out of small rock it looks bad if you did a an entire pound out of monster boulders it looks bad because in nature that doesn't happen you want that contrast a big rock looks big because there's a small rock next to it when you take a small rock and put it next to this other one it gives people perspective so we've got 1300 in the kit with bold it with rocks rocks about two grand five hundred five tons typically a rock price is gonna be around $80 a ton if you're using field stone boulders at least in my necklace around here were about 120 okay honey let's just call it a hundred bucks a ton so we've got 500 bucks in Rock yep and then another $100 $150 in gravel okay so we got two grand in materials a day's labor and you're charging nine grand for this just for this job 11 by 11 is nine so this one's gonna be an 11 by 16 we're gonna probably be in the 11 grant 11 range so the guys are gonna walk home that night with about eight thousand dollars of profit in their pocket and then they're not gonna work all next week and just do one more the following week and make more than you can in a white-collar job so this is that step two we talked about very first thing I want to do is get this thing located to where it's gonna sit in the yard okay because and then get this located hook up the fittings hook up the plumbing into the back to cos and all the spoils from here get flipped put over here and now we get to spare you this thing if you can take all this dirt throw it we're here first then later you'd have to shovel through all of that stuff to get this thing set dig through all that to trench your pipe and it wastes all kinds of time people how do you know what elevation assess the spillway yeah great question so the biggest mistake people make the same mistake we talked about with the pondless waterfall they set it too high this looks very unimpressive right now doesn't it each of this waterfall yeah when I'm done and that's only about maybe deal 17 inches above grade at this point well we're done by the time the berm gets out and through here by the time or big boulders you get here it's gonna feel much bigger what I want to try to avoid is that volcanic look so we have what we call that two to three fourth floor once we get this set in the levers off I want to bring soil all the way up to here when it comes to here what I don't want it to do is go down like this so then I've created an anthill or even worse this volcano with water flowing out of the top of it I want that dirt to feather out as far as I can possibly take it the bigger your berm the more natural this thing looks the other thing I never want to see his boulders brought up to this to try to hide it that looks really really ridiculous okay so who said it here you always said it at the opposite end of the other filter so this is our mechanical filter this is the skimmer so what this does is it has a suction that comes across the top of the water the reason that's important is we're gonna set the water elevation approximately right around this screw hole here so as the pump is discharging water outside of this box it creates a suction coming in any leaf debris that falls inside of the pond is going to get drawn into a catch basket which is sitting right over there a little black catch basket so for easy to remove we remove that stuff out the other important piece about this is this entire system is designed as a functioning unit it's like buying a full mate fully made car right you go to a car lot you buy something it's designed all the pieces are designed to work together if you wanted to build the car on your own you can do that it's gonna take a lot longer you're gonna have to put all these little pieces together and you're gonna have to configure how all that stuff works this is designed as a system we get consistent results because it took us five years of R&D 25 years ago to come up with that process the right skimmer the right pump the right pipe the right biological filter you take out one of these pieces it impacts the function and there's gonna be an impact on the water quality the fish etc so the reason I'm saying that is the skimmer is responsible for drawing that water in keeping that leaf debris outside of the pond is key because if you don't have a skimmer that debris falls to the bottom decays rots and causes problems the other thing that does is it now sends clean water without debris up to our biological filter that's going to detoxify the water so that's the key to all of us the water returns everything gets circulated nicely and then the cycle repeats we're doing one part of the plumbing over here okay so this is our various part for a lot of concrete yeah which is really it's a no-brainer so with your bio Falls you're gonna get you see two holes on the back side of this I got two bulkhead fittings here and then two other miscellaneous fittings here the key with the bulkhead fittings is this you have two washers you have this flexible rubber washer and then you have a hard rigid washer the only thing you have to remember the rubber washer goes on the water side of every container so I'll come over here drop this in flip this over and I'll put my plastic washer on this has that reversed thread on it so I spin this on no blue no Lube that rubber washer as I compress it down creates a nice watertight seal notice I'm just doing it hand tight here now if you get that in dirt you got to clean that rubber seal because that is where your water that's that feeling this that rubbers that rubber seal is vitally important yeah so I don't know if you can see the Stanley but this is plastic right which also means there's plastic threads on there so when I'm tightening this I only want to go maybe one full turn a past and tight to hold this you see it going maybe and maybe a little bit more all of us are strong enough to keep going and going but eventually you'll pop that plastic thread if you hear a snap don't think it's okay now 22 the leak and you got to get a new bulkhead fitting now you're gonna put a inch and a half conversion down right yep so I've got this I've got a two inch male pipe adapter but notice I think we've got snow that's two inch pipe we got two inch pipe for the two inch male pipe adapter I have two apps like a button here or here but we've decided to put the skimmer box there so I want to make sure I put this on this side of the container where the pipe will run this way this one here is an opposite option so we just give you a plug and you plug it up if you wanted to you could run another pipe off of this and occasionally back open it up drinking the water out and run it to a lower area it's not necessary though this bottle Falls we don't think us many much more than once a year every time you clean it you destroy all that beneficial bacteria that's growing in there so back flushing this thing would be restarting your biological filter over and over once a month and we wanted to get aged right so with this either a little bit of teflon tape around each one of these or in the kit they give you some silicone so I'm just going to put a little dab of silicone around the threads of this and then thread them in okay you've already got the the Flex line it's black so that it's not something straight we get a clear line and it got exposed to sunlight it's a algae trap so you use black we use one area we bury it all set for schedule 40 so uses regular schedule 40 fittings the nice thing about going with flex pipe versus rigid pipe this is freeze resistant it'll handle the brutal winters of Chicago land area zone five very very easily the other nice thing about this is I was talking just a little bit ago about matching the right pump with the filter if you have rigid PVC I'm gonna have a series of 90s and elbows and 45s zigzagging my way over to my to my filter every time I put a 90 degree elbow on place they puts back pressure on the pump and it limits the flow rate that is gonna cut back on the circulation it's gonna cut back on the filtration we forgot to start the time clock so we started I did take a look at it you guys it was 16 minutes 16 whatever so we're 14 minutes in my bad so much I'm a cubic yards you typically have to haul out or what do you do with the spoils on this case zero you don't haul anything out we're doing a side and that's because we're creating waterfall so so even with a pond of this size you don't hollow anything out so rule of thumb you have an 11 by 16 foot pond 2 feet deep you're gonna have an 11 by 16 foot berm to football our waterfall is going to be 2 foot in Hall so all of the soil is gonna round up and wrap around that and I'm gonna make it look natural dang dirt monkey gets 1 point what is the depth of the pond 2 feet 2 feet 2 feet below grid okay Duke your water not to people oh great it'll water 2 feet of water so what is the depth below grade then you but we usually set the water level 3 to 4 inches below our main viewing area so let's just pretend the house is over here you come out on the deck I want that water level they come close to this right so this would be my zero point we're gonna set water level 3 inches lower than chopping the bottom of this area okay right everything else will get adjusted to that now if you have a typical yard this is your house this is your deck what's a yard do this is tree decorated the house features the weight all pitches so if I want to put a waterfall on the opposite side over here what would I have to do to that waterfall I've got to get brought way up right as it comes up how much bigger does your Bernie to get bigger and bigger and bigger so a lot of times then you change the design around you might bring the waterfall work way up here let it drop into a pool take advantage of that slope that goes away let this spin through a little stream and put the pond down here a little bit more but get something visible from inside the house okay so you got your initial shelf done that's the outlying shelf the center shelf goes off how deep Brian another 8 to 10 inches so what's the maximum depth set into yourself compete so this will be about 16 to 18 inches below watch this the bottom this should be around 16 18 inches below water level and then we'll do another one that'll take us to our final 2 foot down oh so you got three shelves in here three shelves yep okay so every website is gonna tell you a different piece of information especially regarding fish and how how deep does upon need to be to have fish in there someone will say 3 4 5 6 whatever we've been building ponds 2 feet deep housing coin them for over 25 years and if fish were dying in 2 feet of water at this point in our careers we'd probably say make it deeper but they don't die they make it through every winter and this winter how cold egg did negative 37 negative 37 negative 50 at one point but one day was negative 50 we're gonna my fish are still alive in there so they see most important now actually that the scientists tend to go over to why we do have to keep a whole bird in the ice because our gas exchange so what we want to do is we want to release carbon dioxide so carbon dioxide is going to be decomposition and happening the fish are going to be respiring is still on the right respiration is gonna be happening carbon dioxide they'll suffocate if it's closed off so by having a little hole in the ice carbon dioxide escapes and allows oxygen to come in we have a little bubbler or small basically the plumbing on the the skimmer is almost identical to the back of the bio falls so you've got your your two holes that were pre-drilled here that the bulkhead fittings go on from this point after installing the two bulkhead fittings guys remember the rubber washer rubber gasket goes on the water side so it's gonna go inside the the skimmer itself the nice thing about the skimmer is that you can run a couple different configurations out of here because of the the two bulkhead fittings you can have two pumps you can have a pump and overflow if you have two pumps in here and still want to do an overflow there's actually a dimple that is drilled on the back and use that as your guide and you can use a hole saw how to another hole put another bulkhead on there and actually have your overflow out there and have a pump enough let's let's talk about everything you just said an overflow allows for when the water fills up from a natural rainstorm you give it an outlet somewhere so it doesn't just spill out and ruin your whole landscaping correct so you have a dedicated overflow zone they're gonna know that the water is gonna run out the reason you want to have multiple pumps is maybe you've got one returned pump and you've got a separate separate pump powering a fountain or something else it could be some underwater circulation Jets it could just be another supplemental pump for the waterfall itself oh so we want to get tuned it's gonna be right about here oh the third dim here so that's what we shoot for so now the face plate on these on this type of a skimmer is adjustable so we could actually raise or lower the water level by three inches but we always use that as our benchmark and then we could go plus or minus from that point here's the thing I want you guys to be successful and a lot of guys are going to go oh I can just use this cheap knockoff brand or I can use something else I'm not a believer in that just do what they're doing and then if you see some kind of a way an opportunity to do it then do it but don't start running out of the gate thinking you're gonna improve upon what these guys have been doing peg ordered this clock up Amazon yeah just to do this pawn bills unreal okay no wait a minute you wouldn't want to know something even more unreal okay all…