Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Need Input On Existing Pond

Original owner of 23 year old pond, 3/4 A surface area, dam has slight leak through back side when full (probably not cored correctly). Basin seems to fine. Builder had good clay & black dirt to work with. My questions: Should I repair leak before or after drilling a well (to maintain water level)? Is compacted clay going to be the best fix for this type of leak? How many GPM will I need to keep it full? How much can I expect to spend on well construction & pump operation?

Hello there Handsome.....lol you should really change your name, as many are probably afraid to address you.....lol! Can you do a 180 and show us the watershed?

Oh by the way, I'm not sure of your exact location, but I'm probably not too far from you, I'm north of St. Joseph about 17 miles.

It would need to be a great well. One inch of water over one acre is 27,000 gallons.

Are you sure the basin is fine? I'd repair the leak when the pond is low and before trying to keep it full with water from the well. I would go with clay to fix it, but you have to know where the leak is, or blanket the whole area. The clay has to be installed correctly (read that as compacted correctly) for a good chance on it fixing the problem.

I'm not being "smart" but unless you can tell us how many gallons it's leaking out in a 24 hr period, my answer is you will need as many gallons going into the pond as is leaking/wicking out, plus what is evaporating, plus what the plants along the pond are transpiring, plus one gallon.

My pond is dug into the water table, in sandy soil. I can run my well 24/7 and when the water table starts dropping, it will just barely pump enough water into the pond to keep it at the level of water when I turned on the well. I cannot raise the level of water in the pond once the water table starts to drop. My well puts out 25 to 28 GPM, and I run it thru a 3" pipe roughly 150' to 200' to get to the pond. The ground slopes down gradually to the pond from the well, so there isn't much head pressure at all.

Your costs will vary according to how big of a pump you will need, what your electrical rates are, and how long you have to run the pump. Running mine (3/4 hp) 24/7 most of a month will cost me around $100 to $125.

Around here (NE Texas), drilling runs around 10-15 dollars a foot. Do any of your neighbors have wells? Wells are like real estate prices, location, location, location. However, I drilled a well this year and it saved my pond. You can also use it to run an irrigation system.


I would fix the leak first if you can find it.

My 4" well cost me $3300.00. It is 66' deep. That includes all the electrical wiring, pump motor, double stacked well screen, bladder tank, etc.

They had to run 120' of wire to the breaker box, another 50' of wire to the pressure switch in the pump house, cut thru an 8" thick concrete wall to get the water pipe to the bladder tanks, run about 50' of either 1 1/4" or 1 1/2" poly pipe to the bladder tanks from the well (not including the pipe going down the well casing, one way valve, and whatever else they had to do. I didn't opt for a variable speed pump, that would have added another $1,000 to the bill, but if I were to run a larger pump, I would have gone that route.

Well, hello Jimmy! Yeah, sure I'll take some pics. It's actually creek fed through the spillway. Creek is dry except for run off rains though ..........

I drive to Kovacs for my fireworks, about 60 miles.......

Looking at the maps, it appears there are some decent wells in my area. I'm in the bluffs above the Kansas River......

Here's a panoramic view of my pond .......

Thanks esshup for those figures! 60 Ft would most likely the very deepest I'd have to drill (judging from the existing wells), so $3 large would probably cover it.

No problem. With the motor/pump that I have now, it pumps 25-28 gpm. We doubled up on the well screen, and the well driller said that I could pump up to 100 gpm just by changing to a different motor/pump. When the casing was there, without the pump or pipe inside the casing, the water level was 13' below grade.

[quote=esshup]Are you sure the basin is fine?

I'm not being "smart" but unless you can tell us how many gallons it's leaking out in a 24 hr period, my answer is you will need as many gallons going into the pond as is leaking/wicking out, plus what is evaporating, plus what the plants along the pond are transpiring, plus one gallon.


Water level stabilizes once it drops to the level in the pics, so I'm assuming the basin is sound. The bottom rolls into a "V" & runs the length of the pond, so this is a deep one when full.


Actually, I was asking how many GPM it would take to maintain it after the leak was fixed.

O.K. All ponds leak a little. Until it's filled, that's an unknown. Find your pond on the map here.

There's 325,851 gallons in an acre foot of water. In your pond (at 3/4 ac) each inch of evaporation = 20,366 gallons. So you can figure out how many gallons you will need to pump per year just to keep up with evaporation. Bigger is better when dealing with pumps, I'd rather pump for a shorter amount of time than have the pump running for a longer period of time.

Thanks esshup! This gives me a better idea of the effectiveness of using a well. It appears one needs one heck of a pump to make a difference in even a small pond like mine!