Hi - I am wondering if anyone can provide me some feedback with my pond. I recently bought a property that has a pond and during the Spring the water was clear. Come summer it started to form a little algae so I decided to treat it.
Rather than use Copper Sulfate and other related type treatments I decided to try a natural route. I ended up going with Natures Pond Conditioner as well as adding an aeration system.
After adding both the water has become very cloudy. I performed the jar test to see if it's due to the aeration but the jar remains cloudy after a day.
A day or two after adding the pond conditioner the pond because cloudy and lots of debris came to the top. It looked a lot like brewing beer, that stage after you pitch the yeast.
My guess is the enzymes are doing their work but I'm not 100% sure yet. I'm curious if anyone else has had something like this happen.
Here is some basic data w/ photos:
Pond Size: 1/4 Acre Avg Depth: 7' Amount of Pond Conditioner: 1 Gal (1/2 Gal one week, 1/2 Gal a week later) Time since adding treatment: 2 weeks Aeration: 4.2 cfm via bubbler at a depth of around 10' in the middle
What kind of fish do you have in the pond? Is the entire pond lined with the pea gravel? It kind of looks like Calcium has dissolved into the water and made it slightly milky looking. If it's calcium, it will eventually precipitate out.
If you have Koi in the pond, they got more active as the water warmed, and will have reproduced, adding many more mouths rooting around on the bottom, but whatever was stirred up, should settle out in the jar.
Pac27 is a safe alternative algae treatment to copper products, or Blue Tilapia....contact Bill Cody here on the forum for those.
The clouding could be a result of the bacterial reproduction that was added, but is more likely just coincidental to another unknown cause.
Thanks Rainman. To answer your questions the pond has descent population of bluegill and largemouth bass. We did add a small koi and 5lbs of Blue Tilapia around 2-3 months ago.
The pond has a pea gravel beach and the rest is a clay/muck bottom. My hope is that by adding more enzymes I can help reduce the muck.
I did forget to mention that I added 2T of pea gravel to the beach. However, I only got around to adding about half of this to the pond. The pea gravel was dirty as stone is so was wondering if that was a cause too.
I figured my jar would have settled by now but it's still cloudy. I'm guessing the bacteria is doing it's work but being a noob not sure how long that stuff takes to work.
Go with 30-40 pounds of Blue Tilapia next year and you will likely see a large reduction in the muck after the algae is gone....I never suggest less than 10 pounds Tilapia, in even a small pond.
The minimum stocking rate I determined years ago in Ohio is 40# per acre for effective algae control, so at 1/4 acre, 10 pounds is your ponds minimum rate.
Your water does just look to have dissolved rock dust, likely calium and should clear on it's own in time.
Excellent - next year I'll put in 40lbs - now that I know. My jar test is clear so I think you're right about the rock dust. Good news is - it's cloudy but so far it's not weedy.
