Pond Boss Forums AERATION Systems questions What is your #1 pond aereation pick/ advice...?

Hello,

I am in the market to purchase an aeration system. I have done a lot of reading and searching on the internet to try to determine what system is a good fit for my application. My pond is oval and somewhat shaped like a jelly bean. It is ~200 feet long by ~90 feet wide. The average depth is around 6-7 feet deep. The bottom (according to a sonar) is soft and mucky.

The pond itself is about 25 years old. When we bought the property 4 years ago, it was very neglected. It had lots of filamentous algae, and probably every waterweed that exists. Long story short, we have done a lot of clean up over the past four years and it now looks pretty good. Up until this spring, we had a lot of bluegills/sunfish, minnows, bullheads. The pond currently has no aeration system. We have not had any winter kill or any other kill, however the large BGs and sunfish seem to have vanished over this past harsh winter. I only found two dead fish in spring. One was a blue gill and the other one was a bullhead, but I have not caught any BGs and I have not seen the typical spawning areas such as previous years. The bullheads are still around . So, to eliminate any kill potential and to help overall increase the health of the pond, it looks like we need an aeration system.

My question is, what type of aeration system do you have and how do you like it? Are there any preferred brands or manufacturers?
The Vertex units look good to me. I do not think a windmill is a good fit for our location since we don’t get much wind down in the woods where we live. Please give me some feedback on your systems.

Thanks in advance for any input.

Hello, grasshopper, and welcome to the forum.

If you have a lot of woods around your pond, going electric rather than windmill is an easy decision to get right. I have a windmill at my 1st pond which I love, but will be adding electric aeration for my new pond (and also for the first) after I get electric run there (later this year, fingers crossed).

Folks here with electric aeration systems have run the full range of options from complete DIY to fully dealer provided & installed. If you can DIY, you can usually save a little money. If you are unsure of making the right connections or lack the time, having an aeration professional do everything will get you a properly sized turnkey system ready to go. So you need to decide where in this range your comfort zone lies.

My personal plan is to have one of the excellent pros here spec and size a system for me, buy it off them, and hook it up myself. Kind of in the middle.

P.S. When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, you will have pried it out of my cold, dead fingers.

Grasshopper,

There are currently two ponds on my place, one with aeration, one without. One pond (Bg/Bass)is 110' diameter with an average depth of 10 feet. In this pond I installed a DIY system based on information gleaned from this board and its members. The system consists of two 9" disc diffusers, one at a depth of 8', the other at 12'. The diffusers are about 20-25 feet apart. Each has its own airline. The 11' disc has a 1/2" black poly lead weighted line attached to it, the 8' disc has a garden hose attached. Both lines are married to a single Gast compressor rated for 2.6 cfm @ 10 psi. I bought it from a surplus center with it costing around $54 including shipping. At the time of purchase, they had a number of them in stock but a quick check of their site does not show any now. The diffusers I purchased from Diffuser Express for around $16. They were special ordered with 0.5 mm slits which may be standard now. The compressor sits in my barn on a timer......it is loud, at least to me, when its running. The compressor is set to wake the neighbors up at 11 p.m.(just kidding) and shutdown at 4 a.m.. At my current electirc rates, I guess the system is costing $5-7/mo to run. Both diffusers produces a nice rolling "boil" and is probably overkill for this little puddle. My reason for aeration is twofold (1) Maintain good water quality with the main focus being D.O.. My last water sample showed a D.O. of 9 ppm. I'm happy. The second reason ..........is to wake the neighbors at 11 p.m. : )

Hope this helps.

Forgot to add this. Pond Boss ran a bunch of articles on aeration in its last issue.

Russ

Use the search feature for lots of good info about the better quality electric based systems using abt 1/4 - 1/3 hp (abt 4-5hrs /kw). You will no doubt get some private emails from sellers. Surplus center compressors are usually outdated and can be okay if you find the correct unit.

Since your pond is relatively long and narrow I would try to install two diffusers similar to what Russ described. An aeration system with two or three diffusers is best operated and most efficient with a compressor producing 4-5cfm. The main cost will be the compressor with associated hardware of manifold, airfilter, pressure relief valve and low pressure air guage (& sometimes check valve). Air guage helps a lot to trouble shoot any system problems. If you run the system in winter (icecover) a pressure relief valve is a must have item to protect the most expensive part (comperssor) from damage of frozen airline. 2nd largest cost may or may not be the preweighted airline. Airline can be as cheap as 1/2" black polyethylene irrigation pipe (abt $0.10/ft as unweighted) or preweighted around $1.50/ft. The main thing to watch for is to weight it so as to not ever kink the airline which would then need to be repaired to remove the permenant kink. Airlines are often moved or lifted thus causing the tendency to kink. Despite many sales claims, membrane diffusers should be periodically cleaned which means lifting or moving airlines.

Unweighted 1/2"-5/8" airline usually requires abt 0.5 lb/ft to get it to properly sink and lay flat on the bottom. If you use a compressor that produces 3-5cfm I highly recommend 1/2"-5/8" ID airline compared to 3/8" ID airline for lower cfms of 1-2.5. Going with the smaller dia airline usually requires a new airline when moving up to a larger compressor someday. However if you can manage the larger cfm compressor right-a-way I tell people in my NW OH area that it should last abt 20- 30 yrs before the bearings go out with 5-8 hrs per day operation. I have compressors out there running for 15 yrs now and they have not had the first vane change. One should expect abt 3 vane changes on high quality compressors before the bearings go bad.

The two main enemies of compressors are moisture and excessive heat. Thus cool (well ventilated) and dry operation results in long compressor life. The other item that lengthens compressor life is to try and have the compressor operate at a less than recommended maximum operating psi.

I'm a pretty big DIY person but I don't have any regrets for buying the complete package, even if I spent a few dollars more. I have yet to see a DIY aeration project as nice as the manufactured kits you are interested in...no offense intended to the DIY aeration people because they have come of with some pretty nice set-ups on the cheap.
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Thanks for the great replies. I appreciate everyone’s time. I will use your advice and make an erudite choice.

Right now, my pond is overflowing with all of the rain (12+ inches) that we had over the weekend. I would have to guesstimate that at least 50 gallons per minute are running out of the overflow. I have another pond that has an overflow that runs into my main pond and that is adding a significant amount of water to my main pond. The good thing is that it is handling all of the extra water and has not gone over the banks.

I’m glad that I didn’t have the “Lake Delavan” problem. That lake burst its bank, and the 25 acre lake is now Empty!