Has anyone ever used geothermal piping to cool down there pond water ? I have a pond 12' deep or better that I am trying to keep trout in all year round. The temps are 58 degrees on the bottom but the DO is not good. I would drill a well if I knew I could get good water, but here in West Virginia a good well is hard to come by. If you go too deep you get iron sulphur water. Shallow wells will run dry. A friend suggested building an infiltrator system that collects ground and spring water but that might not work in dry periods either. Any one have any suggestions of what the cheapest way to go would be.

How big is the pond? I would think the amount of water you'd need to cool the volume would be hard to accomplish through traditional geo set ups.. maybe multiple setups . Aeration can be used to make your water column more fish friendly from top to bottom but still might not accomplish the needs of trout..

Iron and sulpher are not so bad...The odor gasses off pretty quickly and the iron can be oxidized my creating some heavy turbulence which would always be a good idea to oxygenate well water, anyway. A short, rocky waterfall can look great and be very useful.

I'm not sure what the "cheapest' way is to try cooling water, since none are exactly cheap. at all. Aeration run on from about 11pm to 8am could possibly keep your bottom water oxygenated without raising the temps too high for trout and not fully destratifying your pond...

Rex, I tried aerating that way. Didn't work 'cause it mixed the top warm water with the cooler water and temps were still above what RBT would tolerate.

After playing around with hypolimnetic aeration for a few years I think a LOX tank and some micropore diffusers would be a better set-up, providing they are adjusted properly.

TT,

First, welcome to the forum.

Next, what part of the state are you in?

Where does the water come from that fills your pond?

I'm near Capon Bridge and keep trout in my ponds from mid-October to about the end of May.

But, there are a lot of trout grown in the state year around. I volunteered at a WVU research facility about 15 miles from me where we raised thousands of pounds of trout kept in raceways. We had culls in about a 1/2 acre pond that was 4-ft deep. But, we were feeding all of this from a large spring that put out water at 53-58 degrees F. We still had to add supplemental oxygen.

I would suggest you call my good friend, Dr. Ken Semmens, the WVU Aquaculture Extension Service manager (304-293-2657). He is extremely knowledgeable, especially regarding growing trout in WV.

Tell him Ken G. told you to call. He and I have served many years together as officers and directors of the WV Aquaculture Association.

Regards,
Ken G.

I have often wondered how it would work to cool my own pond with a high flow degasser column. Last year I started experimenting with degasser columns first to oxygenate and de-gas incoming well water entering my pond and then after that wasn't 100% successful I used the same column moved to an indoor situation with brook trout in tanks. The problem with my pond/well water setup was that I just wasn't pushing enough water thru the column and into the pond. At 5gpm for 12 hours a day it did nothing when it came to cooling the pond although it did help the dissolved oxygen. What I have often thought about was that after talking to a very large government run hatchery up here in Ontario last year I found out that similar degasser columns as mine and can take 50gpm easily. Here are my thoughts......

When I ran my column with just well water at 8gpm I instantly noticed that the water entering the column to the point that it exited dropped 7 degree's!!! What I have thought about would be pumping water out of the deep cold water in the pond, up thru the degasser setup at as high of a rate as possible and then instead of letting the water just run out directly onto the surface water...have a large plastic or steel colvert or drain pipe directly under the degasser outlet and reaching down into the depths of the pond entering back into the pond where the cool but oxygen lacking water is....Hopefully that makes sense!

What I found was that the faster the water was going thru the column(GPM) the more cooling there was. By the time it excited the column it would be at least 5 degree's cooler than entering and full of oxygen and void of most bad gasses!. This setup would need to be suspended from a dock and in my pond would work really well. The nice thing about the degasser system is that it doesn't need huge amounts of PSI or water pressure but LOTS and LOTS of flow so even a pump with high flow numbers like a sump that can lift water 10-12' would be perfect.

here is a post for some great info on the columns in the later part of Cecil's post! http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=342266&page=2

Yeah too bad Cecil's gone..

Maybe I don't understand the system fully but what's to keep the water from just over flowing out of the top of the culvert that is running down to the deep water?? Or is it a closed pressured system..?

water pressure and gravity will do it and if a bit over flows its not a deal breaker I have the bottom pail of my degasser column converted to an pvc drain and piped into my building and into my flow thru tank setup...if you drop the freshly aerated water directly into the large pipe/culvert it will no doubt push down the water below it and because cool water sinks and this new cool water is being forced tot he bottom...it will stay in the bottom column of the pond.

Ryan

PS...where is Cecil?

He left the site.. A few bad apples can ruin the bushel, can't say that I blame him some times

Cecil left? I have never seen anything but respect given on this forum for all points of view and theory. I respect Cecil very much but leaving solves nothing.

Cecil got tired of one particular a hole and it wasn't me. Right JerKeB ?

WHAT!!!

Wow where have I been? Cecil was a great source for yellow perch behavior and pellet training.

Back on the subject I wondered the same thing. I have seen ground source loops in a large trench 8 feet wide down 6 or 8 feet with the loop being just about a mile long. The surface area of the piping and length of the loop is the key for its thermal efficiency.






Cheers Don.

IMO your best chance for raising trout in marginal climate areas is to have a well or spring water feeding a small pond. The smaller in inflow of cool water the smaller the pond needs to be. When I was in PA and MI, I have seen real small cement ponds that were fed with a small stream of continuous spring water to grow some trout; a miniature raceway system. It does not take much space to grow trout. Area as small as 8ftX8ft or even 6ftX6ft will work providing you have a constant small inflow of cool water. The member here that had the smallest trout pond was a student named 'small pond'.
See some of these links to trout in small ponds.
http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=275081

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=320032

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=26404&Number=337938#Post337938

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=336903

http://forums.pondboss.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Main=26341&Number=336885#Post336885

I just found this info tonight http://ontarioaquaculture.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Aeration-Page.pdf I was asking Cecil about this very thing about how oxygen and gas levels change thru each stage of the degasser column last year. This PDF is actually from a local source to me only a few miles away (Alma Research Station) and is run by the University of Guelph. They are highly into trout and the study of trout and salmonoids like Artic Char and Atlantic Salmon. I have yet to get an dissolved oxygen meter (will be getting my new indoor setup back up and running tomorrow and will have an o2 meter by the end of the week hopefully) but one thing I have noted with mine like I stated above is how it actually cool's the water. My new setup actually has 8 packed pails in the column with 14 feet of vertical drop so I am hoping for even better results than last years setup.

Ryan

My pond is 80ft wide by 150ft long and 12 or 13 ft deep.

Ok so my math says this.

80X150X12 is 144,000 cubic feet,

144,000 cubic feet is about one million gallons even,

You then have about 8,400,000 million pounds of water in your pond. 8.35 pounds per gallon.

It takes one BTU to raise or lower one pound of water one degree.

If your pond needs to drop 10 degrees you would need about 80,000,000 million BTU's of cooling.

My pond is about one million gallons as well and will end up at about 75 degrees in the summer months. To fight that I would need to have about 80-100 BTU's of circulation through a loop just for the summer months to keep the water around 65 for the summer.

Now the ground stays at about 53 degrees. If your water is 75 degrees for it to come out at 65 you need a constant exchange of 10 degrees. Your pipe in the ground would need to be long enough to get the exchange to happen at your flow rate.

Maybe some one could give a flow rate for a natural spring that keeps a million gallons at trout temperature?

Cheers Don.