Anyone have experience in keeping a pond full off well water?

About 1-1.5 acres in surface area. Most of it will be no more than 4 feet deep with one small hole probably about 10 feet deep.

Great ground water but not so great soil for retention.

Would like fish but not a must.

Will be used primarily for retriever training.

I have one in my back yard about the same size. I share it with five neighbors. We put in a 4 inch water well.

It's stocked with catfish, bass and blue gill.

Do you have to run the water over rocks or something to add O2?

I assume you have some type of float that shuts off the well?

How good is your soil?

Put a layer of bentonite down if its currently dry, will help with water retention

World record fish, so I hear.

You're wanting to evaporate your ground water.

How much does bentonite cost?

Gonna be a crazy amount of evaporation. Between ground loss and evap, gonna be running non stop in the hot dry months.

This or a lot of clay.

It's stocked with catfish, bass and blue gill. [/quote]


Do you have to run the water over rocks or something to add O2?

I assume you have some type of float that shuts off the well?

How good is your soil?



[/quote]

We have a little waterfall by the water well. We turn the water on and off with the circuit breaker. The pond is over 50 years old and has a lot of silt in the bottom.

It rarely makes sense due to electric cost. Without fish you have a mosquito problem. With fish, you can have all kind of problems. I’ve been doing this for a bunch of years.

We each pay $300 a year, for electric, fish food, Karmex, and the dreaded subsidence fee.

I went with solar in the back. It feeds that trough and a tank a hundred feet away. Mainly for live stock and wild life but I caught some perch from the tank in the front and put them in there.

Too much. Don't waste your money. If you don't have clay or a pond liner it will never work. Running our pump in the summer, non stop added $200 a month to my electric bill. It now goes dry in summer and we haul water to metal troughs.

cut the size to 3/4 acre, drill well to 2nd or 3rd water, install 6" commercial pump and make it manual operation.

dig the pond to 10' with a 15' hole somewhere in it and you can keep it usable all yr. long.

I have 4 wells feeding a small pond off the patio, one duck lake about 1.5 acres and another about 6 acres. we have good retention but evap kills them in july-sept.

these wells are only about 40' deep and in first water, should be about 50' deeper according to the drillers that installed the replacement pumps (lightning got the first ones) to be in 2nd water. you need to be sure the pump will have water to draw or you can dry your well in no time and then have to wait a day or more to let it replenish, 2nd or 3rd will prevent that.

lastly, all totaled together it ain't gonna be cheap.

If you buy it as drilling mud, is it any cheaper? Aren't they the same thing, a type of clay? I have a pond that seeps. Red clay is being quoted to me at $180 for 12 yards. How thick does it need to be to form an effective liner? I'm not sure I can wrap my simple mind around a plastic liner. Don't livestock mess them up?

don't know about where you are but here in fannin county they make you register the well then pay 1 cent per gal. used, had to meter all 4 of our wells even though we are exempt due to being a registered wetland area.

This is just my opinion but if your tank isn't in good soil and if it doesn't catch natural runoff you're fighting a losing battle. If a tank is full you can keep up with natural evaporation with a well but that's about it. This is just my personal experience. Others might have had better luck than I've had.

If you are up near Hawley in the shinnery or Clyde in the sandy area the water will drain through the sand almost as fast as you try to fill it.

There is an old saying about pissing against the wind.

My pond falls 4 inches each week. We can add 4 inches in 24 hours. We get runoff from most of the subdivision. A 2 inch rain will overfill it by 4 inches, which will give the water well a one week break. The subsidence board limits us to 10 million gallons each year. We seldom put over 8 million gallons. Our biggest problem is algae.

Cheaper, I'm not sure, but it's a heck of alot easier for a vac truck to kick on my pump and spray it, vs laying it by hand with 50lbs sacks. The dry stuff you can get at the feed store has the consistency of powdered sugar. In my experience dig it as deep as you can get. Throughout the years of silt from runoff, debris etc, it's not hard to loose 2' of depth. It's also important to get some grass going around it once you tear the top soil up digging it out. I'm my buddies runoff "ditch" we dumped 4"+ size rocks to help catch debris and hand spread rye on the high side banks to aid in loosing dirt into the pond.

It would be south of Clyde. There are several stock tanks in the area that hold decent water. I found when setting fence post that at about 3 feet I hit clay.

I spoke with a few people and I can't find anyone who pays for any of their well water.

If I get serious I'll just have to see what kind of soil I have.

Thanks for all the replies.

D bag down the road from us did it and dried up wells for miles....he made zero friends. Aaron Watson owns it now and he's still sucking the ground water dry.

I’ve tried bentonite several times with either no luck or no skill.