Saturday, 22 June 2013

The fountain of frustration

So lately I've been spending some time working in the garden. The most recent idea has been to transform the rather basic pond fountain into a more attractive waterfall.

The fountain is about as basic as it comes, little more than a pump which I salvaged from an old fish tank, submerged in the water, with a power cable running across the garden and into a plug socket in the spare room.

For the waterfall, I attached a length of hosepipe to the pump outlet and ran it through a pile of rocks that I had strategically located to the side of the pond. I turned the pump on and immediately noticed a slight flaw in this design. Instead of trickling down the rocks and into the pond, the majority of the water instead decided to take a different route and drained away into the garden.

To fix this, I added a length of clear plastic, cunningly crafted from a soft drinks bottle,  to the outlet end of the hose. In theory, you would expect this to make for a less attractive but far more practical waterfall. In practice, a small portion of the stream of water somehow adhered to the plastic and continued to drain away.

To make matters worse, I didn't notice this problem straight away and it was only pure coincidence that led me to look outside and notice that the pond was some two thirds of the way to being emptied.

So its back to the drawing board for now with the pump switched off and a pile of rocks with a lump of plastic in it randomly sitting beside the pond.

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