Jim, Author at Water Shapes

Technidea Updates Digital Leveling System

Technidea Corp. (Escondido, CA) manufactures the ZipLevel Pro-2000, a digital altimeter and leveling system for…

Atlantic Water Gardens Launches LED Bar Lights

Atlantic Water Gardens (Auroraa, OH) now offers the Model WWBL5 Bar Light, a linear LED…

Crystal Fountains’ Sequencing Fog System

Crystal Fountains (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) manufactures NCF300, a sequencing fog jet designed for deck-level applications.…

As a veteran watershape engineer, Dave Peterson has reviewed plans for countless vanishing-edge projects. Along the way, he's developed a preference for a specific approach to angling the top of the edge wall, offering guidance here that applies in nearly every case.

Making Edges Vanish

There are two common options when it's time to design the wall for a vanishing-edge swimming pool: cut it in or cut it away. With a cut-in approach, the top of the wall is cut down into the pool so that the water surface extends to the outside edge of the wall - effectively submerging it even when the water is not flowing over the edge. By contrast, a cut-away wall is one where the top of the wall angles down and away from the pool so that the water surface terminates at the inside edge of the wall. This results in the

When these clients originally made contact, they were after a renovation. But once Ryan Hughes saw the site and the plan and considered what the homeowners really wanted, he persuaded them to start from scratch and work with him in creating the bayfront poolscape of their dreams.

Begin Again

This project started with an unexpected phone call. The clients, who live in Iowa much of the year but have a second home on the water's edge in Tampa Bay, had spotted a Wall Street Journal article in which a photograph of a swimming pool with a "floating" fire pit had been included. They loved the look and figured they could use it to dress up the poolscape that had come with their Florida retreat - if only they could find a local company to do it! Looking through the text, she spotted a reference to the fact that we at Ryan Hughes|Design|Build had designed and competed the project that

Of all the visual offenses perpetrated by pond installers, there's one that upsets Dave Garton more than any other. Here, he offers several reasons for why it's something he encounters with such frequency, then discusses ways to avoid having it happen in the first place.

Wilma’s Baubles

Pond installation offers lots of opportunities for straying off the naturalistic path, but to me, there's no more problematic detour than the unfortunate "string-of-pearls" effect. When this happens, the edge of a pond looks more like Wilma Flintstone's rocky necklace than it does like the banks of a natural body of water. And it's a double shame, because the installer went to all the trouble of sourcing and placing natural material - but ended up with completely unnatural results. I've seen too many of these nightmare ponds through the years. Some are the result of a do-it-yourselfer's lack of awareness. It also happens with

So What’s Up?

The Number One question I have been asked since the announcement of the acquisition of WaterShapes by Watershape University is fairly blunt: "What does this mean for WaterShapes?" My usual answer is, "Not much - and everything!" The "not much" part pertains to the fact that

The Company You Keep

'If you ask a roomful of watershapers about the toughest of the basic business challenges they face,' wrote Brian Van Bower in opening his Aqua Culture column for January 2005, 'there's little doubt in my mind that a large percentage of them would say that finding, hiring and keeping good employees is near the top of the list.' 'Depending upon several factors - the size of your company, its business volume, its focus and how much work you submit to outside contractors - your own approach