What liner should I use to line my pond? Would a preformed pond liner be better?

UNRAVELLING LINERS

Liners are the most cost effective method of making a waterproof pool in your garden, but what is there really to choose between all the makes and materials? Peter May tells you how you can make it neat or natural and also introduces the new Greenseal liner from Gordon Low.

Don’t you hate all those fancy scientific names and acronyms; those strings of letters that only mean anything to ‘them that’s in the know’. Somehow you feel excluded from all the information. But then again all you are Putting in preformed or rigid ponds can be pretty easy. Getting the level right can be the difficult bit.Putting in preformed or rigid ponds can be pretty easy. Getting the level right can be the difficult bit. after is to make a hole in the ground waterproof.
You have already vaguely contemplated going ‘au naturelle’ by puddling it in clay, but then there is all that mess. And then you thought of manufacturing the pool itself in concrete, but a few sums quickly made you realise not only the muck and disruption involved but also the expense. So then you continue your investigations down the aquatic centre and find a huge range of products that all have different names but all look pretty much the same: black, some are shiny, some are not. Admittedly some are rigid and already pool shaped. They will tell you these are made from are generally HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) or ABS (Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene) and those are also fiberglass – mostly bigger heavier pools.

Others liners look like sheets of plastic, whilst some look like rubber. And its here you discover all these exotic names like Pondalene, Aqualast, Maxipool, Alfafol and now everyone is talking about Greenseal – now what’s that?

Despite the variety of brand names most of the liners available are one of several quite distinctly different materials that will all do the same job, and as individual materials they only come from 2 and 3 factories around the world. So it is highly likely that products, or at least the raw materials, with similar specifications will have come from those same factories in America, Belgium or Sweden.

The flexible sheets of material are either PVC (Polyvinyl Chloride) or Polyethylene – those are the shiny ones – and matt coloured ones are EPDM rubber (Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomar) or Butyl rubber. Well as your eyes are glazing over and you feel no wiser, you still aren’t finding the choice any easier. Once upon a time that choice was much easier.