Let me see if I can clarify the site and pond and stream locations. My neighbor to the north of me has a small pond. It is fed by an artesian well. So when it gets to a certain height, it has overflow pipes that drain water onto my property. She has two overflow pipes coming in at two directions. So basically I've built two forks of a stream to combine the two overflow pipes/streams. Then this new stream heads down to my new pond. In the middle of the length I've put in a small wide spot in the stream making a small pond for interest. I wouldn't want a stick of a stream flowing 200 plus feet down to my pond. So in river terminology I have a "Y" forked stream at the top, which goes into a small pond roughly 15 feet wide by 50 feet long. Then the a single stream comes out and goes down to my new pond. The stream ends with proposed waterfall that would be about 3 to 5 feet wide and have a 5 to 8 foot drop. Based on my computations, the waterfall would have to produce quite a bit of water to make it look like a waterfall. Therefore a large pump with a lot of capacity especially if I'm going to move the water to the top of the property and down the entire stream. Which got me to thinking - always dangerous.

My original thought was to pump the entrie amount of water to the top of the stream and let the water flow through the entire stream all of the time. Even when the neighbors pond overflow is not flowing, which is most of the summer months. If I'm going to have the small pond in the middle of the stream run, I'd need water moving in the entire stream to keep things from getting nasty and stagnate. That was the reason for a huge single pump to move that much water up to the top of the streams. But with second thoughts, I'd have to have a pretty well built stream bed to handle 7000 plus gph of water flow. So my second thought was to use two pumps and only pump some of the water to the top for regular water flow in the stream. Then use another pump to use right near the end of the stream just for the waterfall. This pump wouldn't have to lift the water for a 200+ foot long stream as well as the full height of the stream and waterfall.

I hope that clarifies things a little bit better.

My goal is to have a nice waterfall at the bottom of the stream going into the new pond. And have water running year round in the stream to keep anything alive in the small pond and to keep the water from going stagnate during the dry summer months. The streams are only going to be about 5 feet wide, with them more likely smaller when done filling in with river rock for a stream bed. In the end I might need the same pump for the waterfall as I would for the entire stream/waterfall pump. In which case then the question becomes do I pump all the water to the top of the stream or not. How strong of a stream would I have to build to handle 7000 + gph running 24/7?