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#426230 10/09/15 07:55 PM
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Let me start off by saying i have talked to TJ and he asked me to post about my experience. I am NOT trying bash anyone or blame anyone....just a learning experience for everyone, and a possible "sample" for future applications.

That said, my pond was losing over an inch a day...and we had no large rainfalls since May/June. My pond went from 10-12 feet deep to about 2.5-3 feet at its deepest.

Pond was stocked with 100ish bluegill (50 small...may have been fish food): 8 LMB: 9HSB: and 4 lbs of tilapia at full pool (about 1/8th acre).

I read about the Soilfloc here and wanted to get it ASAP to do what I could to save the pond. It arrived Tuesday.

I went to the local farm store and bought some fiberglass rods and put them at 3.5 ft intervals Wednesday, right where the water met the shore.

Due to our on-again off-again drought, I collect rain water. I had about 1500-1600 gallons stored and put that in the pond. I did this Wednesday too.

Thursday evening I applied the Soilfloc. A quarter cup A and a quarter cup B to each 3.5 ft by 3.5 ft area.

This morning I went out and just looked at it from a distance. I could see the water was back down to where the rods were (the water i added was gone).

I went back out this evening to feed...and could smell i had a problem. The fish were dead. Many dead baby tilapia on the shore, dead bluegill and bass in the water.

I am not asking for anything and am not blaming anyone. The truth is, we have no rain in the forecast and if something had not happened soon, I might have lost them anyway.

My goal is just that we figure out what happened and prevent it from happening to anyone else.

My thought is that I had too little water left, and should have treated a portion at a time instead of the whole pond at once.

Questions? Comments?

Sean

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Sean,

Sorry to hear about this. I really appreciate you posting your experience so others can learn. It sounds like you are way low on water. IMHO I agree with you that a gradual application my have been the way to go with so little water to work with.

Has the manufacturer provided any possible cause for the fish kill?


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Bill, just found this an hour or two ago...and talked to TJ shortly afterward. I don't know if he will talk to the manufacturer, I had no plans to.

I might be wrong, but seems like kind of a new product...or use of the product. So figure all applications are a learning experience.

Sean

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Every project I've worked on had a pond with 6-30' depths. Sean mentioned today we're dealing with 2-3' depths. I suspect when he applied the product it became a polymer soup, due to the low water volume. While it's non toxic, fish can suffocate if their gills are coated. When dealing with so little water, there was nowhere for them to hide. This isn't a product performance issue as the manufacturer states the risk of suffocation in wind blown areas, it's a product application density issue. This is something we should have caught - Sean called prior to application, I was at football practice. We may have jointly caught it then and avoided this situation.

Sean's correct - one can still treat with low water, but one would need to treat it fractionally, not unlike the strategy treating algae 25% at a time. With 2-3' water left in the pond and no rain in the forecast, sure the fishery might have been dancing the last waltz - regardless, we both thought this was important to post in regards to low water volume treatments and the potential negative impact on fishery.

Please keep us in the loop regarding your rate of water loss. I'm hopeful you have something positive to report. Per our conversation, I'll make some calls for you next Spring and work on getting some fish for you locally. Thankfully I have lots of buddies down there.

To date - the worst mort report I've had was a couple dozen fathead minnows and a green gill dog who drank very recently treated pond water. All projects had at least 5x the water volume of Sean.

On the not so positive side, I also have 3 reports of customers using the C "coarse" grind polymer and their projects yielded no positive results. While there's no guarantee from the manufacturer, 3/3 coarse grind customers with zero improvement has shed some light on appropriate scenarios and the product's limitations. I'll continue to post all information objectively as I learn it so we can all learn. It's not a silver bullet.


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You're still gonna lose an inch a day or more.
and if it doesnt , you have a severe problem.

Here is why.
You don't have a water well.
My question here is " why would anyone have a lake or pond without a well? OR shed........OR both?

I know that people do it and count on the weather. And this is what happens when THAT happens.

Pardon my sarcasm.
If your pond doesn't lose water ( sealing it like a swimming pool) that yew cant replace, then sir, you will have a pond full of nitrates at some point. You will need to use sunlight and oxygen/ aeration and that still might not do it, given fish population crapping all over the place, and the build up, IF you're feeding them , it gets worse. You have no outflow/ discharge) to empty all of that out. And nothing to flow it out.
About now they are living in muck. They will not grow.
Plus you have an 1/8 pond?????????? And you have open water swimmers like HSB???????? The smaller the pond is , especially in your case, the more water it will lose ( think . You're over stocked, You cant possibly keep these fish fed and healthy. Sealing and never losing a drop of water is not the answer. There's even more to it than this. Like PH balance.
The list goes on .

None of this is easy......or everyone would be doing it.

I'm apologize for not sugar coating this.
this is what you need to know.

Of course there was a fish kill.

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You say you could smell the decaying fish, 24 hours after applying the product? Any chance some of these morts occurred a day or two before the product was added?

And Jason, not everyone has a well emptying into their ponds. We don't, and haven't suffered a fishkill in over 40 years of accumulated fish wastes. And we run a heavy biomass on top of that.

Ponds are not aquariums.


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If we accept that: MBG(+)FGSF(=)HBG(F1)
And we surmise that: BG(>)HBG(F1) while GSF(<)HBG(F1)
Would it hold true that: HBG(F1)(+)AM500(x)q.d.(=)1.5lbGRWT?
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TJ, from my experience this is very likely what happened. I lost several dozen FHM that were along the surface as I was applying. I'm sure something very similar happened here. The surface water absolutely becomes a soup that will suffocate your fish if they enter it. To be honest, I'm not sure even partial treatment of a pond with only 2-3' deep water would have helped. When there is only 2-3' of depth, you are going to have mortalities with any significant amount of polymer, or at least I would think.

Another question, how is the water to air interface during application? Once you have a coat of the polymer on the surface, it seems to me the O2 diffusion would be minimal. Maybe it was as much an O2 crash as it was suffocation?


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I agree with the water volume being too low for the fish. With the small amount of water in the pond, the whole water column probably turned to polymer soup.

If it was my pond, I probably would have pumped water out instead of adding more. Then treated the whole pond basin as a "new" pond, then waited for it to fill again.

My personal pond, when I bought the place, was supposed to be 20' deep. It turned out to be 7' at the deepest part. When I renovated the pond, I dug down to 22', knowing that the pond would drop between 5' and 7' in water level from wet spring to dry fall. I did my best to save the fish that were in the pond during the renovation, but if they had died, I wouldn't have given it a 2nd thought.


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Sprkplg....my water is low...small pond. It would be hard to miss a bunch of dead fish in it, especially when treating with the Soilfloc. I would say it smelled "fishy" when I walked down there last night. Not really a rotten smell...but not usual.

Some history of the Pond: it is a watershed pond. I have a church and it's parking lot next door. This drains back into a ditch that feeds my pond, and a cross our yards into my pond. My back yard is 1.5 acres and also flows into the pond. Lived here about 8 years (pond was here when I bought it) and did not see the pond go dry until this last draught. We had the most rainfall ever record here in May. First time I ever saw the overflow pipe in use. Our drinking water lakes were at around 20% prior to the rain and went to 100%. We got very little rain since.

I feel the polymer soup comment(s) is what happened.

This morning I see some minnows alive in the water. I doubt the BG bred due to my water level drop. I will throw the minnow trap out in a week to see what it is, but my bet is tilapia.

My current plan is to clean out what I can get to with a long handled shovel, and wait for rain. When it rains, if available, pick up forage fish and get started for next year.

Long term I plan to put drainage pipes in my yard and drain half my roof into the pond too (1600 sq ft shop, 1900 sq ft house, and a two car wide by two car deep carport...shop and carport are metal roofs).

Sean

Last edited by Boburk; 10/10/15 11:01 AM.
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I wonder if applying soilfloc via a 6"-8" dia. vertical stovepipe or pvc pipe would prevent its injuring fish in upper water strata while allowing it to spread out over the bottom of the 3.5' x 3.5' area. Is it a heavy enough solution to sink quickly?

Last edited by dg84s; 10/10/15 12:06 PM.
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When I got done applying it, it all seemed to be on top of the water still. So I dont think it sinks quickly. When I went out last night and surveyed the damage..I was poking around with one of those fiberglass rods and some seemed to have settled to the bottom in the shallows on one side of the pond (did not check the rest).

I know nothing of polymers, but since both are solids when applied, I wondered if they could be mixed and then applied.

Sean

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It sounds like the small volume of water you had left was choked up with the polymer, leaving no room for the fish. If I understand the chemistry correctly, it reacts with a great deal of water to create "snot". If all you have left is snot, the fish are going to have a rough go of it.

Also the only leaks you will plug will be in the basin where there is water to carry the snot into the leaks. That means right now, you probably have a very well-sealed bottom basin, but the side-walls will likely still have leaks that will need to be addressed.

What I wonder if if the materials can be tilled into the soil on the exposed sides, and as the pond fills or it rains it will be effective in getting those areas currently above the water line?

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I am thinking similar to 'liquidsquid's comment. This "soilfloc" is for sealing ponds. IMO you should have waited to apply the materials when the pond was full. when a pond has a leak it usually keeps leaking through the side walls until the level stabilizes which means the main leaks are in the upper side walls and not so much in the bottom areas still retaining water. Apply at full pool so as the pond recedes the sealant is absorbed into the areas that are leaking. The main problem that I had with pond sealants is it can work effectively as long as the pond stays full, but when there is a drought and the pond does not stay full, the water level drops and the exposed walls dry and crack through the relatively thin sealant layer and thus old cracks reopen or it forms new cracks in the exposed side walls.

Last edited by Bill Cody; 10/12/15 12:55 PM.

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I've wondered about what happens when say BG spawn time comes around and the little fellas start digging 6 to 8 inch deep holes in the bottom. Does the sealant layer go deeper than that or will the pond leak in those areas?


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Common misconception, it's not a liner, however, the cross-link polymer enters fissures and travels as far as the current can take it where it lodges and expands. This could many feet below the basin or sidewalls of the pond. Walking on my pond sides treated with Soilfloc has not impacted the seal to date - still holding tight.


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I believe that if the soilfloc is applied and mixed to the pond basin that is above the water, when the water level rises it will be activated and start to work it's way toward any leaks.


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If the two components have to mix to create the polymer sealing compound, how can they properly interact and mix if applied dry and separated by soil granules? In rising water conditions they would become wet, but couldn't interact and change at the molecular level; unlike sodium bentonite that only needs water to swell, soilfloc needs its components to be touching and wet at the same time. I don't believe tilling into dry soil and waiting for rain will work.

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Couple comments...

After the May rain, I thought I was set for a couple years...but it stopped raining and the water level kept dropping and dropping. My pond was losing an inch+ a day. I was desperate to try SOMETHING to try to save the pond. I did not see waiting for full pool again as an option.

Plan was to treat what I had water in, then treat each time water level rises. The fiberglass rods are placed where the water met the shore when I treated. So if water got above that, i would treat between the rods and the new shoreline and move the rods. Do this after each increase in water level.

I don't know where i read/heard it, but thought I read something about tilling the product to a depth of 4 inches in a new pond...but i have read so much about ponds lately, that might have been a different product.

There are some schools of small fish left...probably tilapia. I saw no large tilapia when I cleaned up some of the larger dead fish...not sure if they sank, or taste better to whatever has been hauling off dead fish. Did find a Couple nice dead RES though.... I did not think I had any FHM left..but did find three dead ones.

Sean

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If you look at this pic, at the end of my finger (where the leaf is) is an old tilapia bed. Two days prior to the pic I was throwing fish food to small fingerlings in it...obviously no longer holding water in the pic. My water was dropping that fast.



I am standing on my peer taking the pic...that is why the leaf in the bed looks so small...it is a full size leaf.

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Originally Posted By: dg84s
If the two components have to mix to create the polymer sealing compound, how can they properly interact and mix if applied dry and separated by soil granules? In rising water conditions they would become wet, but couldn't interact and change at the molecular level; unlike sodium bentonite that only needs water to swell, soilfloc needs its components to be touching and wet at the same time. I don't believe tilling into dry soil and waiting for rain will work.


I might be wrong, but my understanding is both components are soluble in water. If that is in fact true, when water is introduced to the dry pond bank where the granules have been tilled in, the granules of both components will dissolve and head for the leak where they will come in contact with each other. Again, just my understanding but it might be wrong.


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The two components do not mix to create the sealant, they act independently and serve different purposes towards the same goal. The linear polymer acts as a floculant - attracts suspended clay molecules, gets heavy and sinks. This acts as a soil conditioner, adding clay to the bottom of the pond if you will. Some of this can be carried by leak current into the fissure. The cross link polymer is what is carried into the current of the leak and expands, creating the seal. The linear polymer helps by adding clay to the process, but they do not interact with one another in order to "activate".

Aquaben maintains the product is used successfully during pond construction as a dry application integrated into the basin and sidewalls much like bentonite. They cite it's often applied with bentonite, if affordable and available, and good results are experienced. I have never been involved with a dry application, but have studied it in advance for projects that might arise so I can help as much as possible.


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Cool stuff TJ. Learning a lot here! So if the two components do not directly interact, why not just mix them together in the correct ratio and apply as one product?


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That's what I personally do, and several others have done, but it's not application process recommended by the manufacturer.


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TJ, any idea how much increased hydrostatic pressure on the treated area aids in success of the application? When I applied mine I had the water 6" over what I call 'full pool' and kept it there for several weeks. My pond still seemed to lose water rather quickly until I got down to 'full pool'. Now it holds water better than I could've ever imagined. In fact, I'm thinking this winter when my geothermal is running hard and evaporation is low, I may have overflow.

I guess what I'm getting at, if there is a way to raise the pond above the level they want to maintain it at, I would do so during treatment and for several weeks after. But that's just my opinion.


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Corey, that's what I did, also - but many don't have the ability to irrigate and can't control water levels like we can. I agree I think it's the best strategy to employ.


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