The Complete Handbook of Fountains & Waterfalls

Chapter 1: Understanding Fountains & Waterfalls

Water in Motion: The Core of the Matter

A fountain or waterfall is not a decorative object. It is a small hydraulic system, and it behaves according to the same physical rules that govern municipal water supply or industrial pumping. Water is heavy, it is incompressible, and it always flows downhill if it can. Every design, every component, and every maintenance problem in this book traces back to those three facts.

Consider a typical residential pondless waterfall. A pump sits in a buried basin, pushes water up a hose to the top of a rock formation, and the water spills back down over the rocks into the basin to be recirculated. The water at the top of the fall has potential energy from being lifted. As it falls, that energy converts to kinetic energy, which appears as flow and, at the bottom, as noise and splash. If the pump is too small, the water barely trickles over the rocks. If the pump is too large, the water shoots off the rocks, splashes out of the basin, and creates a mist that winds carry away. Neither is a design preference; both are the direct result of a hydraulic calculation that was either done incorrectly or not done at all.

The single most important concept to understand is head. Head is the vertical distance, measured in feet, that the pump must lift the water. It is not just the height of the waterfall. It includes