On 3/22/2012 5:31 PM, MikeWeston wrote:
Hey there, about 2 years ago I had a landscape company come in and make
a pond for me, they used a fairly good liner, everything with the pond
was fine up until a year ago, and I've since lost their number. My pond
was leaking quite a substantial amount of water, and we couldn't find
the leak anywhere.

I decided to go online and look at bentonite as a possible remedy for
patching the leak. I was assure that it would, which is not my main
issue now.

I think some of the problem might have been with how I applied it, and
I'd just like to know what on earth I can do to clear up my pond. I
purchased the "powder" bentonite,drained the pond, and sprinkled
bentonite in between all the rocks, and pretty much every visible
surface of my pond. I think I may have messed up the application by
lightly wetting the bentonite, and letting it "set" for an hour or so,
then I filled the pond. Now it's all murky.

The bentonite has turned into a wet sludge type clay. We've tried
draining the pond to let it dry, to no avail.

Any suggestions on how to make the wet bentonite set/ How to fix this
issue would be greatly appreciated. We've wondered about putting sand on
top of it, would that help?

I've never heard of the bentonite solution for fixing pond leaks before
but I did use bentonite as a filtering agent to "polish" my aquarium
water from time to time. My guess is that baring total removal, you're
going to need to encapsulate it somehow given how fine it is. And,
baring this, I would think that any movement in the water would stir it
up and cloud the water again. I'm not aware of any pond filters that
remove this fine of a particle.

So, to your question, I guess you could cover it with the sand.