Pond Reline, Maidstone

An existing customer of ours that we do regular pond and aquarium maintenance for over in Maidstone has two ponds. One is a free-standing Blagdon Affinity Pond which we set up for him a few years ago. It houses a handful of Goldfish and a thriving colony of Stag Snails. We regularly maintain this pond maybe once or twice a year to keep it in good shape. His other pond is a lined in ground pond which we did not have any involvement in setting up for him however we do also regularly maintain this. The issue this customer was having was with his bigger in ground pond which a friend of his lined and along with this also installed a filter system. The issue was rainwater was getting under the liner causing a bubble to form reducing the usable swimming space for the resident Fish and worst of all the water level was dropping on a regular basis. We found multiple areas where the liner had not been installed correctly leaving open edges for rainwater to make its way under. Along with this we found an area at the back under an overhanging tree where a split was, assuming a branch at some point had fallen in and damaged the liner. The liner that had been installed was a HDPE liner which is one of if not the worst quality liner on the market. We explained our findings to our customer and offered a solution in the form of two quotes, one for a PVC liner replacement to keep the project to a lower budget and then an EDPM rubber liner replacement which would be the best long term solution with its superior thickness and quality. The customer opted for the EDPM and with that we set a date to return.

We returned on the planned date to carry out the work. We started by emptying the pond and moving the Fish into a holding pool. Whilst the pond was empty as agreed with the customer, we took the opportunity to trim the surrounding and overhanging bushes and trees that may pose difficulty reaching once the pond was full again. We also dug a small part of the pond six inches deeper to allow more space for the fish to swim. We placed the new liner into position and began to fill it with water. Once it was full we went round and trimmed the edges of the liner to size allowing an appropriate length of liner to be left to be properly pinned down to prevent rainwater getting underneath the liner once again. We capped the pond liner edges with soil and pebbles to fit in with the surrounding existing landscape. Ultimately the Fish were returned to their pond, and a cover net was installed as the area suffers with Herons. Upon the customer’s request we will also be returning to install a new filter system as the previous one was poor quality and really was not adequate to do the job.