As I haven't been able to find a property with a large enough pond, I'm starting to think more and more about just buying land and building my own. I'd prefer to build my own anyhow, but I'm a bit paranoid about soil quality and water sources. The last thing I'd want to do is buy a piece of land, then get out and find that I can't even build a pond because the soil doesn't have enough clay content.
But as long as the soil would hold water...and I wouldn't have to look at a liner for a 5-10 acre pond, I wouldn't have a problem adding a well to keep the pond filled.
But what kind of issues (pH, Alkalinity, oxygen, etc) are there with using mainly/strictly ground water for filling and maintaining the water levels?
This topic has been discussed within a lot of different threads.....maybe mr. ewest or someone can link up to a couple for you.
My experience is that typical groundwater (GW) lacks high dissolved oxygen concentration. depending on where you are in the world, it can have high alkalinity, hardness, low or high pH, but these things can be overcome by getting a water quality test to know if you need to add lime or some other substance to help correct physical chemistry issues (get the pH neutral, etc.), and allowing the GW to run overland (for oxygenation) before entering pond, or aerating as pond is filling.
i'm sure that lots of folks on this forum have a significant volume of their ponds full of well water and do just fine, maybe they can share some of the things they need or dont need to do.
Thanks for the answer. I guess I'm not looking for too much specifics...just to know if it's possible or something that I should quit thinking about now before I get started with something.
of coarse Paul, it also depends on what kind of yield you can get out of yer well. For a 5-10 acre pond you'll need rain and a decent sized water shed to help you out. if you rely solely on well water, it could take a long time to fill....
Somebody help me if I am off base here but a 5 acre pond average depth of 8 feet holds over 13 million gallons of water. you get a 50 gpm well it would take over 6 months to fill it running pump 24/7..lots of electricity there.
My 1.25 acre pond is essentially entirely filled with well water.
I would ask other people nearby who've had wells drilled if they could provide a breakdown of alkalinity, pH, hardness, iron content, contaminants, etc.
Also, as D.I.E.D hinted at, it would be nice to know the typical depth at which they find water so you could make some estimates of electrical usage.
Issues like seepage are paramount if you're going to do this. You could also modify the goal and create a 3 acre lake with a maximum depth of 12 feet and an average of 5 feet. This would be 15 acre feet and 3 million gallons. You could manage the heck out of a pond like that and keep costs contained a little bit.
Wow...I was expecting a much greater rate of flow.
We looked at a property a few weeks back in the general area where we're looking that had a 5 acre pond. It had a well feeding it, and the water was pouring out of the pipe. I'm guessing more like a gallon a second, not a minute.
paul, i think i mentioned 50 gpm above, not 1 gpm.
in my neck of the woods, if you can get 50 gpm, that's about as good as it gets. 50 gpm is just about 0.8 gallons a second....thats a pretty darn good flow rate.
in fact water is so sparse in my particular local area, i was tinkled pink to get 10 gpm at 200 feet in my new well.
I get exactly one gallon per second or 60 gpm. It's plenty to keep my little pond full to overflowing.
Oops. Three hours of sleep really hits the reading comprehension.
But you're right. I never did the math on that one.
The one answer I never got from that seller's agent about the well had to do with how often they ran it. The number they gave me was $90 if they ran it for two weeks. But I couldn't get an answer as to how often that had to be done. I don't know if they had to run it two weeks out of every month to keep it full, or if they had run it two weeks just to get it at full pool for the property listing.
But you're right...I never did the math. But if I could fill the pond for $1000, then I may just do it so I could get started on stocking. Probably not a lot in the grand scheme of the pond.
Since my well is 350+ feet deep, I can run it all out for 2.5 months for 1,000 bucks. That's 75 days, or 1,800 hours, or 108,000 minutes, or about 6.5 million gallons. If your pond is 5 acres average surface area during filling, then you would raise it 4 feet for 1,000 bucks. Since my pond is a little over one acre, I could raise it 18 feet....you get the picture. If your well is shallower, then the cost becomes incrementally less.
I get one half gallon per minute. Yep, .5 gpm. I wouldn't count on anything like 50 gpm in central Texas.