Solar Fountain Pump Review: A Bird Bath Upgrade

I picked up a fountain pump. I've seen a lot of people review this online. They call it "PopoSoap," and they've got the letters in different fonts or different colors. It looks like "PopoSoap." I don't know, but that's the name of it. We'll see what's in here. I was going to buy a big one for my pond, and I thought I would start off with a small one first. I've got a fountain that my wife's been wanting me to rebuild. She got it from her mom years ago, and it had some holes in it, so I am going to now go in here and fix up her little bird bath.

The Pump and Solar Panel

This is a very small pump. It's a six-watt, I believe, pump, and it comes with a solar panel. That was kind of my motivation – the solar panel – because you don't have to run power out to this thing. I've got one area that has a little bit of sun for a good portion of the day.

Here is the solar panel. This comes with what looks like different water nozzles or divergers, whatever the proper name for them is. This is the stand for the solar panel. You kind of stick that in the ground, and then this just slides onto this. If anybody used to talk on a CB radio, this slides on kind of like the mount on a CB microphone, just slides right on the back, clicks into place, and then you have a thumb screw here. You can change the angle on this, and it does have teeth in it, so you don't have to tighten it really, really tight. Once you find the right spot, get it into one of those notches, you can just make that finger tight.

This does come, if you don't want to put it on a spike, there are screw holes in this mount, so it would be easy to mount, let's just say, to a wooden fence or something like that, or the edge of a picnic table, whatever piece of wooden furniture you have outside.

Future Projects: Tiered Waterfall

If you wanted to use this as a water distribution pump, for example, I'm going to build a tiered waterfall. It'll have a bucket going into another bucket going into another bucket. The pump will be in the bottom bucket, this hose will go back up to the top bucket, and then the water will make the little path down the way. I think that'll be a future project. I don't know if this pump's going to be big enough for that or not.

They have what's called the maximum head, which is just how far the pump can lift water. I don't know what it is on this one. That's not what I ordered it for, so I haven't investigated.

Nozzles and Attachments

Anyway, you've got these little stackable pieces. This goes on the pump, then you put one of these nozzles on the top. These are stackable, so you can make it a little taller if you want. Then you've got different caps that go on these on the top of it to get whatever kind of water column that you want, and I will show you some of the different pieces once I get everything put together, and I don't have any sun right now, so as soon as I have some more sunlight, we're going outside.

Testing the Pump in the Bird Bath

Alright, we've got the fountain right here, and over here is the solar panel with the little pigtail coming off of it. Just plug this in right here. It does have a waterproof connection. Plug it in, and then screw the sleeve down on top of it, and that should be watertight. Now, we can do this with the pump out of the water because it has a run-dry protection circuit in it. If it's not submerged in water, it won't run. See, it starts to starts to run as soon as I put it in, and then quits as soon as you take it out.

If you want this to float, you can put this attachment on and then it'll float no matter what the depth of your fountain is. Let's try some of the attachments and see what we have. This does come with a couple of extra filters. See what this one does.

Oh wait, that's going to be way too high, I think. No, it's not too bad. That's not bad at all. Let's try something else. This is kind of the one that I was interested in. This one makes the little column, little tube of water, I think, and then you can adjust it by screwing this in and out, so let's see what we get here. Yeah, I like that. Of course, it depends on the level of the pump, and it depends on the wind. I've got a wind coming in from this side.

Let's try another one. So, if you just want the water going straight up, let's see how far this goes. I'm just going to take this off. Whoa, that's a little tall for my little bird bath. Right now, it's kind of a me-bath. This attachment gives you a lot of options. You have these that will go on here if you want to make this taller. There's a couple of stands up here, so you can elevate the whole flow.

Let's see what this one looks like. That's uh, still a little bit tall for my bird bath 'cause it's going to splash most of the water out. So, let's try one of these, and these just screw on here.

Okay, let's try a different nozzle. Okay, and again, I'm going a little bit high for that. Now, this I could put this maybe on the plant shelf over in my pond, but I kind of wanted something in the bird bath. Let's see, we tried those two. Let's try this one. I see that. Why this one it's hollow in the middle. I just realized what this one was for is so that you can put this in the top of it and this on the top of that, and you can have two. Don't know why I didn't think of that earlier, but there it is.

Let's put this one on. Okay, now again, I'm losing water out of my bird bath, so not a good option for me. Now I'll show you those little extensions I was talking about. If we put this one on with the extensions, there you have a nice little effect. That makes this one again too tall for my little bird bath 'cause I can feel it on my legs. But if I put that one down low, it should be okay.

Yeah, I'm not, I'm not knocking anything out of the bird bath with that one on there, and I've got a little bit of shadow on the solar panel and well, let's see, the sun just went in and we're still running. I don't see any shadows anywhere. The sun is completely behind the cloud. I don't know if the phone can pick that up or not, or if it just washed it out, but uh, the pump's still going.

Final Thoughts

I would say that's a win. So, between the bird bath in my koi pond, the birds around here should have a pretty pretty good day. So, I'll demonstrate the low water shut off again. Pick this up. As soon as the pump comes out of the water, I I don't know if you can hear it or not, but I can feel that the pump stopped.

I think I like this nozzle best. I just installed this today, so I don't know if any birds are going to find it for a day or two. If I see any before I post this video, I'll either try to throw some video footage or I'll throw a picture of up with them on the uh on the bird bath.

If you're looking for a fountain pump and you don't want to run electrical lines all over your property, I think this might be a way to go. They do offer a couple of versions with higher power if you're going into like if I'm going to put one into my pond, they do offer I think there was a 20 watt and a 30 watt that I saw.