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#496676 09/21/18 12:28 PM
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I have almost read everything on this forum, and it has been enjoyable to be able to learn so much from such a great free resource. My question is unique in that I can't find anything on this site for a bow as large as 140 acres. The lake is natural. The majority of it is five to eight feet deep with 10% being 10' to12'. There are fish in it however I think it winterkills often. I did caught 10" perch so there must be some of it that does not. It is clear 5-6 ' secchi all summer. Most of the shore has lily pads with some bulrushes. I has submerged weeds not excessive but normal for mn lake. I have not tested the water, but I did soil test for food plots. Phosphorus was off the charts high. Probably because most of the 15 acres I own the paper mill dumped all the excess wood chips in this low area in the 50's. I have 10-14 inches of fill on top of 4-5 feet of wood chips. Most of the land is woods, ( lots of leaves) when I did the wood chips they look like new. The water table is within 16" of grade. Some more some less. I was thinking of digging a pond and putting fish in, but now I am thinking of turning my attention to the lake. My main concerns are getting rid of, or reducing the four to five feet of muck and stoping the winterkill. I want to do aeration on the lake. I have many questions about the equipment. Like size, will it work on the muck, how big of a hole do I need in the ice, I have the only outlet creek running though property and it stays ice free all winter so it has some spring action. Am I wasting my time and money if I only do in front of my property? Will fish be smart enough to move to higher d o ? Will aeration and bacteria treatment help with the muck more or is aeration alone enough? Thanks for the time I appreciate any help I can get.

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I also have a 60 acre lake and was told it was a waste of money to air rate it. Would need to turn all the water to do any good. Large lakes hold more DO due to not all the water has fish in it. So it is a storage bank of DO. But if you have a lot of wood chips or plants rotting that also takes up a lot of oxygen. Having just a small open hole in the ice could attract a lot of geese, could produce a lot of nitrogen and have weed problems the following year. I am not an expert so maybe someone with experience will correct me if I am wrong.
Also if 1 hole in the ice would attack some fish I sure would like to know and welcome to the forum there is a lot to be learned from the people here.


61 acre water shed lake. bass, channel cat, black crappie, wiper, walleye, redear sunfish, blue catfish and bluegill. To many bullhead and common carp
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I am by no means an expert on anything pond, but did just install an aeration system several weeks ago (kinda like sleeping at a Holiday Inn). After a lot of reading, researching systems and such, IMO, the cost to adequately aerate a BOW of 140 acres would be ASTRONOMICAL. To provide enough turnover to be able to supply enough O2 to even minimally reduce muck, you would have to have multiple stations running multiple diffusers, then there's the issue of power supply. If you have that kind of cash to throw at it, I'd love to be your new best friend!!

You may be better served to try to reduce some of the vegetation and let natural aeration do it's thing.

You could also look into a circulation system to provide enough current to constantly move your water. That too, would probably be very expensive to get something big enough to move 140 acres of water.


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I'm no expert and not from your latitude so have no solid advice. But if it were me and I wanted to try it, just putting a single air station in front of your place might be an interesting experiment. You could use it to keep a "hole" open in the ice near shore during the winter for wildlife.

I seriously doubt if you are ever going to be able to do anything about the wood chips, with aeration or otherwise. If you have the kind of money it would take to remediate those kind of problems you describe, save yourself the trouble and buy a nice place in the Caribbean instead. It would probably be cheaper and no shoveling snow.

Edit: Just reread your post and I realize now the wood chips are not in the lake. If the stream runs all winter you may not need to keep open water via aeration.

Last edited by snrub; 09/21/18 05:09 PM.

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Sorry Mike I am not sitting on a pile of cash, so I guess we can't be bff's. 😉. But what I do have is a burning desire to see if I can change the dynamics of a bow. There are a lot of lakes in mn that are sustained by winter aeration. Some are only four feet deep and hundreds of acres. I contacted the head of aeration for mn dnr to get some answers winter aeration, and from just reading on the forum It seemed like I knew more than her. I do know that I am dumb enough to try different things to see if anything can make a difference. I don't need to turn over the whole lake, my thinking is I can use aeration for muck removal on my lake front only, but I don't know if that is even possible. The systems I see on large lakes in mn do not make a large hole compared to the size of the lake,, and I have heard numbers like you need 10% open water for the system to work, but I know the lakes I have seen do not reach that percentage. Has there been any info on the size? I know it varies by the lake but Is there any research at all? I probably will have to get a do meter and do some testing to see what I am up against. My thing that baffles me is if I have such high phosphorus in the ground why do I not have a problem with algae? Is there something to do with hardness? P h ? Can a natural lake lock up the phosphorus on its own? I wouldn't have a problem putting in a few diffusers and seeing what happens to muck levels if someone has put them is a lake and noticed some improvement

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It is not practical for private persons to adequately aerate lakes unless they have lots of money for the project. A good way to combat winterkill is to plow snow off the lake in winter. This allows sunlight into the water where plants will produce oxygen. Early snow falls are bad in that, they will early in the winter, reduce sunlight and plant photosynthesis during long winters which often leads to winterkill. Hopefully wind action will blow off snow some areas to bare ice. This is good. It is better to plow snow in strips instead of clearing large areas. With MN winters an old pickup can be used plow 6 ft wide strips alternating between snow and plowed lanes. One can plow 3 surface acres per hour or about 30 acres in 10 hrs on a 100 ac lake. Ideally you want to remove around 30% of the snow. The more often you can remove some snow the less the changes of winterkill.

The other thing you could do is manage the fishery for fish that tolerate low dissolved oxygen such as yellow perch and northern pike. Pike will likely reproduce in 140 acres so lots of then will need to be harvested annually to keep their population from being overcrowded and stunded as "hammer handles".

Last edited by Bill Cody; 09/21/18 07:20 PM.

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And one more thing the creek that is open during the winter is two feet across and a foot deep. When I put stuff that floats in the winter it moves about a foot every two seconds, so not much water I guess. Problem is I get over two feet of snow on the lake and over two feet of ice. If possible would clearing off part of the lake be better than aeration part? Or would I have to do large parts of the lake for either option?

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Removing part of the snow should provide an area of oxygen refuge. however IMO this will only sustain fish in this area and not the entire lake. IMO fish will not seek the higher oxygenated area because most of them will not know where this DO refuge area is when fish are in remote areas.

I would focus snow plowing in areas remote from the inlet steam where DO will be high during winter.

Last edited by Bill Cody; 09/21/18 07:26 PM.

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And one more thing the creek that is open during the winter is two feet across and a foot deep. When I put stuff that floats in the winter it moves about a foot every two seconds, so not much water I guess. Problem is I get over two feet of snow on the lake and over two feet of ice. If possible would clearing off part of the lake be better than aeration part? Or would I have to do large parts of the lake for either option?

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plowing snow is not an option now since I live 2 1/2 hours away, but possible in the furture when I build there. Can I add oxygen to the muck by stirring it up every couple weeks? Would that help? This lake has no public access and only has a few people who live on it. No boats are used on it like most other lakes to add more wave action.

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I would bet the reason the lake does not test high in P is because none of your fill leaches into the water...Being at the outlet stream, any leaching is flushed downstream.



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Rain man you bring up a great point. I guess I won't know till I sample the water. I have called around and am not finding places that test lake water. Does anybody know a place I here that does this? I also would like to know if there are limiting factors for the benefital bacteria besides dissolved oxygen?

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Just seeing if I know how to add my soil test
If it works am going to run into problems with the phosphorus so high?

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