Pond Boss Forums AERATION Should I aerate? 12 hr aeration

day or night? if i am only going to aerate 12 hours a day

It all depends what your trying to adhieve. Temp control or water clarity. I aerate 24/7 thoughout the winter months to keep an area open for oxygen to reach the fish. Once the warm weather of summer comes, I'll aerate only at night when the air temp is lower to cool off water temps.

In the spring and fall when the days are warm and the nights are cool I set the timer to aerate during the day and shut off at night. Once it gets to the hot dog days of summer I switch and only aerate at night. I believe it helps warm the water when you want it to and still gives it O2 in the summer nights when it needs it most.

Are there more advantages to the 12 on/12 off, verses the 24X7, other than saving on electricity? I have been going 24/7.

If only able to operate a system 12 hours a day then night time is the only option. Aquatic plants, just like plants on land, respirate during the night and produce carbon dioxide. Combine that with other organisms that are consuming oxygen at night and the oxygen levels that were built up during the daylight ours are consumed very quickly.

Operation a system 24/7 allows for you to build up a "bank account" of oxygen to handle and lower the chance of high highs and low lows of oxygen levels. Any drastic swing of oxygen like this will stress the fish thereby making them more available for disease and infections.

It depends on what you are trying to accomplish. But keep in mind that for O2(DO) purposes in the warm days when the plants are going wide open the water may not be able to hold any more O2 (saturation) but at night extra O2 is needed and would help.

Better said Eric...thank you.

What do you think about my heat transfer theory in the spring and fall. When days are in the 70s and the nights are in the 40s it seems the daytime only aeration would help warm the pond faster artificially. Expose the maximum amount of water to the 70ish degree air during the day then at night when it is in the 40s or 50s shut it down so only the surface water is exposed to the cold air. It is something I went too last fall. Of course when it is summer I switch to night aeration. I have no data to back up this idea but yet it just seems "right" to me. Thoughts?

I think that would work just fine. I'm going to do just the opposite and see if I can carry-over RBT this Summer.

Did you end up trying this? If so, how has it worked out so far?

I tried aerating at the bottom of the deepest point in the pond, with the aerator set to turn on at 70° and colder ambient temps. It didn't work, it warmed up the whole water column. I turned off the aerator, and I'm hoping that they will survive. I saw 5-7 dead ones during our last heat spell a few weeks ago, but that was also during the time when the aerator was running. Unless 30 trout have disappeared from the pond, or sunk to the bottom and haven't floated, there are still 30 trout in the pond, although I haven't seen any lately. I'm going to pull the trot line out tomorrow (if I have time) and fish for trout. I stocked the trout in late October of 2009 at roughly 1# and 10"-12" each and the largest one so far was 20" and 4.2#. That was caught the 2nd week of June I believe. I did have an aerator running all winter long, in front of the feeder. I fed the trout 1x/day all winter long.

May I make a suggestion, if your trout are still alive, but stressed, catching them might be the last thing you want to do at this point. You might want to wait for cooler weather to assess your population?

brier:

I know that it's not the best thing for them, but I'm really curious and I haven't had a trout for dinner in a while. Just a sample of one to see if any are still there.

Esshup, I just saw trot line in your post, and was thinking you were going for the gusto. The curiosity would be killing me as well. Well, bottom line, I was not trying to insult your intelligence, but when I read trot line, I was envisioning 10 trout struggling on an unattended line for an extended period of time. My bad.

As you probably know the trotline was for the CC. I'm trying to take out as many as I can to make room for HSB. The CC are just too darn hard to catch and I'd like to try HSB. I know that I won't get all the CC out, but I think I have at least 300# in the pond. I'd like to reduce that number by at least 200#, more if possible.

Interesting.

I've been thinking about various techniques to over-summer trout in the midwest. It'll be years before I have my own place with a pond, but I like to dream.

I have considered the possibility of a pond with a bottom aerator set to run below about 60F air temperature, and a well to pump cold well water through a packed tube then gravity feed it through a pipe from surface to about 15' depth when thermometers at both the surface and the bottom of the pond go above about 65F. In a pond with steep sides and low fertility, I think that this would work to oversummer trout without incurring huge electricity bills.

So far my pond bottom water has stayed cool. I think I have groundwater movement thru my pond tho. It will bounce up and down according to the groundwater level, and when renovating it we hit two horizontal veins of gravel above thin layers of clay at the 11' and 15' mark. Those gravel veins litrally poured water into the pond basin. I had to run a 15,000 gph pump starting at 4:30 a.m. 'till we started digging again after work at 3:30 p.m. just to keep the bottom relatively dry. There was still a foot or two of water in the basin, but at least we weren't digging in 5'+ of water.

Unfortunately we never ran into enough clay to line the pond, so unless I run water into the pond during the summer/fall, the water level will drop 3'-4'.

The farmer down the road installed 5 different wells with irrigation systems, and when he fires them up the pond will lose slightly more than 1" of water a day if I don't run 25 gpm into it 24 hrs a day. The pond is somewhere around 1 1/2 to 1 3/4 surface acres.

I've actually been studying water rights for the Minnesota bar exam. I don't know what the law is in Indiana (not an attorney there, and thus can't give you advice) but in some states, the farmer would have to compensate you for making the water level drop.

I believe in this state it's only if the well starts to run dry, and only if it was installed per spec after a certain date (Whick I'm sure mine was). But, there isn't any problems with the well.

I'm just lucky that this year he planted beans instead of corn. He's not doing as much irrigating as he did last year with corn.