Viewing post #223884 by HollyAnnS

I am sure that some of you have seen this before. I was asked about how hard it is to install a water feature like this so I am posting some directions and pictures on how we installed our Beautiful Blue Ball.

It is a bubbler, a glazed heavy clay egg shaped ball. There is a large hole in the bottom and a small hole in the top for the water to flow out of and down over the ball an back into a catch basin. We used a cut off 55 gal plastic drum, the top ¼ was removed and the bottom ¾ of the drum is buried with just a couple of inches kept above the ground to sit the top piece on. Leaving a few inches up will also help to keep ground runoff out of your drum. You really don’t want to get a lot of silt in there.
Here is my professional hole digger and inspector and you can see how the drum sits in there with the raised rim.

You can use any type of grid to sit your bubbler on. This works with any type of fountain feature. Since my guys are pretty handy I got the deluxe hook up but I could have easily done this myself using a different grid top. Josh made me an aluminum cover plate. He put in a permanent electric line with an on off switch and an extra outlet. Nice for me because I won’t be moving mine (not something you have to do). Hooked up the small submersible pump and the plastic tubing that will run up thru the top of the cover plate and the ball.


Jamie a plumber and lover of all things copper. Decided that I needed a flared copper fitting for on top of my ball so the black plastic top came off and was replaced. Then they turned the project over to me. A little landscape fabric some mulch and several buckets of round river rocks that I had collected. Pretty much finished the job.