I still haven't gotten around to actually measure our "3GPM". It was a guess and I think a bad one when I first wrote this. There is way more coming out of my pipe than what would come out of a restricted faucet and I think faucets are rated at 2.5GPM. Should be a very hard test with a stopwatch and 5 gallon bucket. It might actually be a good algebra lesson for my daughter who thinks math is useless!
Thanks all for the input again. The spring comment had me scared. Like I said before, for some reason the fellow helping me dig this and the neighbor with he roller wasn't concerned at all about the area we were digging from but rather the berm for leaks. We didn't compact the soil at all in the dug section. Let me explain our method for the berm building cause I do think we got all the compaction needed but again I am not an expert.
I would dig all day with a medium size excavator double and triple throwing the dirt to an area where my excavator could grab it. He would lay it down, fluffy, about 9-12 inches in front of him and then roll the heck out of it and get about a 4 inch gain from that. He would do that three times and then straighten everything out again with the dozer and we would repeat! Very long and tedious process. He let me dig all day and would only work on the berm part. The back of the berm is dry, bone dry.... so its seeping through the bottom or the dug side which wasn't compacted well.
One thing I forgot to mention is about 90% of this pond is above a layer of clay my kids were making pottery out of. It was grey modeling clay, very nice stuff. The very bottom of the pond did dip below that level into a sandy layer but we could ball the material up in our hands and it held a ball. I think the thought was nothing would leak below that grey clay after everything was saturated. We did need to dig through it though to achieve the final height of the berm. The higher that berm got the more material was needed to gain a little more hieght!!!
