Fountain

I've started to get back to gardening now that the weather is so perfect. I also installed a fountain in the front courtyard. 

I bought the floor sample here. It was the exact style, size, and color that I wanted and I like fountains that look a little old and worn, so the floor sample was perfect. This particular fountain is made by Al's Garden Art and is the Espana model in the color Rustico (light rust color when dry and very dark brown when wet). They sell to retailers around the US and there is a search on their website for you to find a local retailer. 

During paver install I had run conduit under the pavers right where the fountain is because I knew this was where I wanted a fountain to be and we also needed a path for the drip system hoses to reach all the planters. Well... I realized that the drip hose is taking up most of the space in the conduit, so I had to run a new one. I forgot to take pictures, but it wasn't that big of a deal to lift up a section of pavers to run a new conduit. This conduit is for the fountain's water supply and the pump's electric.

I had the fountain company deliver and set up the fountain. It's about 660 pounds, so it's a bit too heavy to be a DIY for us. The delivery also included an auto fill valve set up. They set the bottom basin on carpet padding to compensate for any unevenness in the pavers. The bottom basin could crack if placed on a hard uneven surface.

 Pump from Home Depot. **I found the "flow control" to be totally useless! I ended up adding a T valve to have better control of the water flow.**

The auto fill valve is connected to a hose bib using small drip line.

Because this fountain is 52" high with only a 46" inch bottom basin, there will be a certain amount of splash-over. This can be controlled by the flow of your pump and the height of the water line in the bottom basin. I had to turn the pump down to just a trickle in order to have zero splash-over. The sound is till nice with the flow so low.

 Splash-over with pump on full power.

Turned the pump down using a T valve added to the tubing after the pump. No splash-over. That's the refill-valve floater there in the bottom basin and the white on the right side of the basin is water deposits from all the over splash after a few days. Since I've turned the flow of the pump down and we had some rain, the deposits vanished on their own.

I'll work on adding a link with a video of this fountain (and some of the other fountains I looked at) so you can hear how it sounds at different speeds. I know that's important to some people. When I went fountain shopping it was amazing how all the fountains sound different. I even thought some had an annoying sound, so I recommend you try to listen to any fountain running (if you can) before buying.

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