plumbing
Where I work in southern California, we're accustomed to seeing changes in water level in our ponds: The air is dry and the winds blow briskly, so evaporation is invariably a factor. Before long, it becomes a familiar pattern, and we know that the pond owner or the auto-fill system will be replacing an inch or so of water every week. But sometimes it becomes apparent that
As I noted a couple weeks back, my to-do list of household projects has long included installation of a small fountain. In the place I had always intended to put it, I figured that the watershape would be visible from the redwood deck where we do most of our warm-weather entertaining; from the stone deck where we
Waterway Plastics (Oxnard, CA) has released its 2016 Pool & Spa Product Buyer’s Guide. The…
In most backyard swimming pool projects, we install the drainage systems for decks after the swimming pool's plumbing, basically because the pool plumbers use big trenchers that will likely destroy the small drainage plumbing if
It started a couple years ago: More and more often, I was meeting clients who wanted great pools and spas that involved no chemical enhancement - just the water itself. These were generally people who had studied up. They had rejected dichlor and trichlor and were opposed to any kind of cyanurate presence. They'd considered saltwater pools until they figured out that chlorine was part of the package. They'd looked at ozone and were concerned
No matter where you turn these days, you'll find watershaping experts preaching the gospel of balanced hydraulics. In class after class, text after text, they all say that if you do exactly the same thing on one side of a tee as you do on the other, you will get the same flow on both side of that tee. If, for example, two main drains are connected to a single tee with pipes of the same length and diameter and the same fittings, those drains will both draw equal amounts of
When I listen to people as they stare at a fountain, I often hear them say, "How wonderful!" In witnessing that praise, however, I know for a fact that what they find appealing is the gracefulness of a sculpture or the beauty of the stone or tile finishes or the way the water flows - what I refer to as the fountain's "façade." In many cases, what's behind that façade can be pretty mundane: maybe a small pump, some simple plumbing, a cascade head or sconce and little more. In other cases, however, what's going on behind the surface is
Just the Opposite