Please help me get my fountain working again

[GB]

My porch has a fountain in it!

It looks a bit like this:

For Brian, that's a fountain where a trickle of water comes out of a lion's mouth into a little trough.

It originally simply had a mains water feed that fed a spout in the lion's mouth, and a drain took the water away. Eventually, the water board cottoned on to the waste, and it was disconnected.

I want to get it working again with a recirculating pump. I have drilled right through the wall where the lion's mouth is, and I can feed a flexible pipe through, and then back through the wall into the trough.

So, I need a submersible pump plus a suitable pipe. That is hopefully where you ladies and gentlemen come in, please.

The pump really only needs to produce a small amount of water - just a trickle. Any more, and it will splash all over the porch.

What about the pipe? My thought was perhaps microbore copper pipe?

I'll hide the pipework behind some shelving, but piping that can take a sharp bend would be best. And how do I make the connection between the pump and the pipe?

[Martin Brown]

My suggestion would be to cannibalise the cheapest nastiest solar powered fountain pump that you can find and use silicone fuel pipe for the actual connection between pump and head. Any old wall wart will do as a power supply.

You might have to limit the current. The one I got for doing automatic watering could throw water 6' into the air when on a proper 12v supply instead of the 6" it managed with a poxy solar panel. Caught me out!

[SH]

what is 6" and 6' ?

[Rob Morley]

Why would you use a submersible pump? You're running tubes through the wall anyway, might as well keep the electrics on the inside. Something like

a bit of PVC flexible tubing. Regulate flow by reducing voltage and/or crimping the tubing. Don't forget to switch it off or add antifreeze when it's cold.

[Harry Bloomfield Esq]

I have a solar-powered pump, which pumps water from a large pot at the bottom into a small pot at the top, to trickle down through a series of pots. The idea was to use it, to help mask noise - which it does quite effectively.

A tiny pump/motor sits in the bottom pot, with a small plastic feeding up to the top.

Something similar, is all you would need - look on ebay.

[alan_m]

Aquarium supplies - small bore plastic pipe for air lines etc. Micro irrigation pipe for watering plant containers etc.

[Tim+]

Standard UK nomenclature for 6 inches and 6 feet.

Tim

[Animal]

Last I looked you could get a tiny submersible for £4 from China. I tried one, no problem. 3 or 4 watts iirc, produced more than a trickle.

[wrights...]

6'6" obviously. Bill

[Brian Gaff]

You will find that if the area is warm the water dries up very much more quickly than you might imagine. Anywhere you could hide a small header tank, recalculate into that and then the low pressure gravity feed would be closer to what was there?

Brian

[alan_m]

Where I was staying over for a couple of weeks in the summer there was one of those solar power fountains with quite a large tank of water. The tank had to be topped up daily. I guess the main loss of water was it splashing on the warm/hot (artificial?) stone surround and then evaporating quickly.

My experience with smallish pumps supplying re-circulated water outside is make sure that you have a filter as algae can block inlets quite quickly in summer months.

[GB]

That's a good point. The way I was looking at it was any leaks will be in the pump/joints. So, have all that outside, in the pool of water.

But, I will definitely think about what you suggest.

Slightly annoyingly, that particular one takes two different sizes of tubing for input and output.

[GB]

Thanks for all the very helpful comments.

[charles]

also make sure, if you are in a hard water area, to used softened or rain water. Evaporation leaves a nasty deposit in hard water areas,

[Pancho]

Phew!, I thought this was going to be a prostate problem!

[Andrew]

From the Spinal tap Wiki :-

"Nigel suggests staging a lavish show, and asks Ian to order a Stonehenge megalith. However, Nigel, rushing a sketch on a napkin, mislabels its dimensions; the resulting prop is only 18 inches high rather than 18 feet, making the group a laughing stock. The group blames Ian, and when David suggests Jeanine should co-manage the group, Ian quits .. "

[Andrew]

If you relocated it to your bathroom, you could use it as gents urinal

[GB]

Got that to think about, too.

[Animal]

it might get so used anyway, if you're in town

[Martin Brown]

One advantage of a submersible pump is that there are some very cheap ones about intended for small solar powered fountains. Being submerged allows it to dissipate heat as the water flow is a great heat sink.