Gilraen Took

Over on dendroboard someone said that waterfalls are a pita to get right, so I figured I would ask here if anyone has successfully done one in a somewhat shorter water bed? If it is a Ton of work I'll do a pond instead, but if it isn't too much hassle I'd kinda like one for the palu that I'm planning on.

zer0zax

Waterfalls are a BIG pain, but if you get it right on then you will have the best focal point possible! I had a good paludarium setup a couple years ago in a 110 gallon tank that was 30" high, water was filled to just under half so the waterfall fell a good 15".

A picture is worth a thousand words, but I took none (Doh!). I tried to different aproaches, the first one was using a cheap table-fountain pump and gluing a plastic hose straight up the wall. The bad part is when I turned the pump on water shot straight up into my light fixture, so I put a big plastic bottle cap on the plastic tubing and this proved to be the easiest way to get the perfect looking waterfall (after moss started growing). The only downside to this setup was I wanted an even bigger waterfall, bigger than 2 inches across at top, but for smaller aquariums this would have been perfect.

The second approach was to get a bigger waterfall and I used a spraybar, only I cut a good inch long horizontal slit in the middle and 1/8th of an inch vertical. This effect was awesome because the water spread to 2" up top and the rest of the spraybar created a nice dripwall, so growing moss and ivy or creeping jenny was no problem, even a little emmersed java fern. For this waterfall I used an adjustable powerhead because it was a fine line between a mere trickle and niagra falls. The hard thing with this is that it was very tricky to adjust the water flow to get it how I wanted, bump it once and spend 5 minutes adjusting again.

zer0zax

Sorry, not done blabbing yet!

How deep is your pond going to be? If it is only a couple of inches deep, then I would use a cheap fountain pump so you don't have to worry about fouling it. Last piece of advice (I swears it!), one thing that helped a whole lot was growing plants up on each side of the fall to help keep it inbounds and not splash everywhere so much, this works real well because you can sculpt the falls by trimming a leaf here or there. The most IMPORTANT thing is do Not let the waterfall hit the pond underneath and splash on the front glass. By all means, the pond can touch the front glass so you can look into it, but continuous splashing up will result in mineral deposits! My Ph is 6.4 and hardly any Kh or Gh, and I am still trying to scrape that crap off! If you read all this you deserve a cookie, good luck!

tundra girl

I have now completed 4 different waterfalls and IMO the are no more a PITA than the back wall it's self. I mean you have to do a wall anyway so why not throw a few carefully arranged rocks in too.

The first one is on my 25 gallon paludarium-I don't care for that one as I wasn't able to completely hide the pump. (just a mini jet)
the next 3- I used a 501 turtle filter puting a piece of rigid tubing behind the wall to run the filter hose through. then there are no electrical cords to hide, and it filters the water too.
the best on though I put the waterfall in the corner of the tank-a 46 gall bowfront. seemed more natual somehow.

I will try to get some pics next week-will have to borrow a digital
Cindy

mellowvision

I have a fairly simple waterfall, composed of the output from my eheim cannister filter and a log. the log was shaped perfectly like a flume or waterslide. the output just flows into it, and creates a nice rapids.

the downfalls are that the log is hard to remove for cleaning and blocks a lot of light from the bottom of the tank, and the shallow water gets a lot of light and grows algae.

it really is worth the trouble though.

Gilraen Took

Oops, forgot about this topic! I'm getting a 29 gallon tank and since it'll be for dart frogs, the water needs to be somewhat shallow. So the fountain pump Would work then? That's good to know! I'll make sure to cap it.

zer0zax

I am interested in PDFs but it will be awhile until I get into those. Be sure to take pictures and make a journal, can't wait to see your results!

yoink

I made mine out of great stuff expanding foam and just cut away the part I didn't want. It is inert when cured and can easily be cut, sanded, and shaped how ever you want. I covered mine with paint, then epoxy and sand.

gbbudd

Waterfalls are worth every minute, hour or day spent perfecting it.
http://s194.photobucket.com/albums/z...=HPIM2158e.jpg

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