BurnsFamily Blog

We wanted a water fountain for our backyard but we couldn’t find anything we liked in the stores or online. So we decided to build one ourselves. It took a while to find out how to make one properly: refills itself automatically, features of a good fountain pump, requires little-to-no maintenance, the proper materials to use to ensure watertightness, etc. The real “deal maker” was finding out how to add water to the reservoir automatically without any supervision.

I found this auto fill valve for $15 from a local aquarium store: it’s tied into the 1/2″ drip irrigation system’s mainline so that when the drip system is running and the float valve determines a demand for water, the reservoir receives water until it’s full. (We timed it, it takes about 10 minutes to completely fill the reservoir — much less than a normal deep, drip irrigation program.) During a recent 2-week hot spell (90˚ and 100˚ days), the whole unit performed flawlessly: the system was half-full after 3 days of running without a fill-up. Not too shabby. And the small pumps uses about 20 watts of electricity — that’s about half the power than a 17″ LCD monitor running. We couldn’t find an inexpensive solar cell to power the pump, but we’ll keep looking.

Here’s the original sketches we drew of the water fountain. We knew what we wanted and how we wanted it to look, but we couldn’t find anything in stores that we liked (and could afford). Once we finalized our plan, we went shopping for parts…but we didn’t really know what parts would fit our plans or where to get some of these parts. The game was afoot!

Once we had all the parts we needed, we started testing and the initial assembly. Here’s the picture of the parts, labeled so you know what we used in case you’re interested in building one yourself. The most difficult part to find was the black globe on top: that was specially designed to be used for this purpose since it came with holes pre-drilled to accept a pipe running through it.

We’re quite pleased with the final outcome. It has the look and sound we were looking for:

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Here’s the first test launch of the completed fountain (after we were sure it would hold water!):

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Here’s the finished fountain after the final adjustments..perfect!