A pond is an investment for a lifetime. After the hard work of excavation and soil preparation, you have a water feature you can continue to refresh and enjoy for as long as you like with proper care. Instead of simply planning your pond around your current desired use, prepare it for future applications with careful design and liner selection. By adding a little extra depth and investing in flexible, reinforced liners instead of highly limited preformed liners, you’ll have a pond that’s easy to alter and upgrade whenever you like.
Property Value
Building a multipurpose pond, with versatile size and shape combinations, increases your property value more than a specialty design. You might have a burning passion for raising lotuses or fishing for trout, but what if the next owner has a different vision for it? A pond that is easy to maintain and change, thanks to the use of a flexible liner, is more attractive to a buyer than one with a natural or preformed liner. The new owner is stuck with the same design you chose if you’ve installed a preformed liner. Let them adjust the banks and layout as needed by putting in a flexible liner they can lift and replace as needed during the upgrades.
Preformed Pond Limitations
If you pick a preformed pond that isn’t fish safe or deep enough for koi, you’re stuck using it as a decorative feature only until you invest in a new liner. Preformed ponds are much more likely to limit your future uses of the water feature. Even when you’re ready to pull out the rigid material and replace it with a flexible option, you’ll likely need extra excavation and smoothing to prepare the ground for a bigger and better pond. Start with a depth of at least 3 feet and a better shape and size by building a custom design instead of picking one of the preformed options.
Bank Angles
The angle of the bank determines its likelihood to wash out or erode over time. Since the sides of a preformed liner are rigid, they’re usually formed at close to a 90-degree angle to offer maximum depth in a small package. The soil under these side walls can still erode, destabilizing the pond liner and causing cracks and leaks. Flexible liners allow you to build far more gently sloped banks. Gradual slopes avoid erosion from both the pond’s lapping waves and incoming rainwater. If you want to change the slope of the banks, it’s relatively easy to lift up the edges of the liner and reshape the soil below.
Adding Features
You don’t have to add fancy features to a pond just to make it a beautiful water feature. However, you may decide to add this equipment later as your budget allows. It’s much easier to add optional features to a flexible liner pond than to one made with a rigid material. Rigid liners must be formed to accommodate fountains and other attachments, or they’ll leak when drilled for the water lines. In contrast, flexible liners are easily cut and patched around any kind of penetrations you want to add during the initial installation or at a later time.
A pond that’s easy to change and adapt will make your property much more attractive and valuable. Even if you don’t plan to sell anytime soon, you’ll appreciate how the value of a pond lined with quality products from BTL Liners is retained over the years.
