How to make a stream?

[spiders_r_us]

Would anyone like to share their experience and suggestions on how to make a stream with pond liner or how to hide it? Or other methods? Cheers if you do.

[Epiphile]

I guess depending on your substrate you may be able to just line a recess with the liner, but then I guess you'd have the liner to look at. I've seen some people do theirs with smaller river rock or the like adhered to whatever they used to line the stream. Others I've seen using cement to create theirs, and I've seen cork bark tubes, PVC pipes and other weirdness used to good effect as well.

I'm sorry I don't have any personal examples for you- I haven't attempted this yet, but it does get the gears turning...

[DazzleDiscus]

? Is the stream for a viv or outdoors? If outdoors, I would suggest googling it - there are so many different ways to hide the liners and make a border around it. As for streams in vivaria, I'm doing a greatstuff base, lined with 100% silicone with sand/rock pressed into the silicone while still wet. Havn't done the water test yet, but it's looking very good so far.

I too have seen people use cement (havacrete I think it is called) for making water runoffs in their vivaria. I don't know how to use this technique, but there are plenty of threads here that explain how.
-Dazz

[spiders_r_us]

It's for a vivarium. I'm using a mixture of pebbles, moss, bark and whatever I can find to cover up the liner. Hopefully my plants will just grow and cover what's left. Would love to see a photo of your constructed stream.

[DazzleDiscus]

Gotcha. You might consider putting silicone on the liner and putting sand/soil/ect on it so that it doesn't look like black liner- adding plants around th edge would definatly help in hiding it. Maybe adding sheets of common moss would work too (ie: having part of the moss touching the water's edge so that it never dries out).

I just finished waiting for the cure time on the silicone, but have lost the addapter to the water pump. *sigh* It's around here somewhere- I plan on doing a thorough scouting expedition for it later on tonight. Then I can test it out. I have some pictures of it without water, and I will see about posting them later on today as well.

[spiders_r_us]

I'm not having much luck with mine. Something seems to have gotten caught in the pipe or the valve, so I'm only getting trickles from the stream. That's me for not putting a filter on the pump (but now I have and it's too late). I hope it's stuck in the valve, access would be easier compared to the rest of the pipe buried under all that dirt.

[Epiphile]

Ah, I hate it when that happens. Good luck- hopefully you don't have to rip the thing up to get it sorted out.

[darc]

One thing to consider when building a stream is to make your pump accessible without having to tear everything down to access it. This sound kind of cliche, but if you tear out half of your viv once or twice to fix your pump... you'll learn.

The way I built my stream (in a previous viv) was to have the flow run from back left to front right (back left was elevated). The pump lived under the substrate (false bottom) but had plenty of tubing for the stream so it could be pulled all the way to the pool I made at the front right (with an attached cable). I attached a cable to both sides of the pump so I could pull it towards the pool in the front right to access it, and then after maintenance I could pull it back to the back left so that water circulated correctly from back left (entering the pump, and going up) through the stream to the front right (the exit from the stream, which will then get sucked to the back left towards the pump).

My streambed was made from cheap clear plastic (used for painting) contoured by the substrate (aspen, with rock/gravel bottom, suspended above water bottom) and held in place by "large" rocks on each side of the plastic. Then, I placed some 1"x1" tiles in the stream bed to cover, protect, and beautify the plastic bottom.

It looked pretty good, and it worked pretty well, but my pump was a piece of crap.

-darc

[spiders_r_us]

Thanks again guys.

I do have the pump in the reservoir for access. Although I still have to move the drift wood and a rock, it's no biggie, but Jesus yabby pinched me... damn Jusus yabby. (that's his name, since he survived 24 hours+ out of water and survived a lot of other incidences)

The layout of the pipe was similar to yours darc, so I pulled the pipe out a little and used a syringe to force the water out and voila! I fixed the problem. Didn't see what was jamming the flow though.

[Epiphile]

Well, good to hear it worked out. Maybe it was just a kink in the line or something.

I didn't know what you were referring to when you mentioned the yabby- after having looked it up it all makes sense now... quite a gambit for your fingers to run there to get at that pump.