I had left over soilfloc from my first episode of pond bottom sealing dating back to fall of 2015. My goal was to retreat in the early spring when water had warmed but before vegetation came in. Well, as you all know, life happens quickly and you blink and it is August 20 something!!
So I asked my dad to stop by again and now that we have the system down from last time, we made short work of treating the pond again. This time we didn't fuss with marking out the shoreline as we knew from experience last time that when we apply the product with a hand crank grass spreader that you get a very even plume on the water that spreads out to about 8' wide before settling. We just made sure that the men, one on each side of the pond with ropes, moved the boat into the leading edge of the plume to apply the next 'lane' of product and were sure to have a overlapping section.
I don't know if the product covers more area with a spreader verses tossing cups of products in one place, but I know we ordered enough product to 'treat' the pond according to TJs directions last fall and seemed to have about half of it left after the first treatment. We had overlapped the pond heavy and really treated it twice last fall. I treated the whole pond again last night and even went back and redid about 1/3 of it the 3rd time where we feel the leak might be. I still have a 5 gallon bucket of part A and B left (I think 1 unit)
Conditions were perfect, not a breath of wind. As before, the water cleared up very nicely. The aerator is off for a few days to let things settle.
We had a tornado come through Grand Rapids on Saturday and it brought an inch of rain. The pond is at record levels so we treated the edges heavily and the hydraulic pressure pushing the product down should be ideal as well.
Grand Rapids is not used to the prairie style tornados with a tornado on the ground on/off for 2 hours! Spending some scary moments in our basement on Saturday hearing the live street by street path of the tornado be broadcast over the local stations as it barreled toward us. Fortunately, very little structural damage to houses, just damage where big trees were pushed on to them. Mostly just tons of mature trees pushed over and lots of limbs torn off and debris. It had a direct hit at my work but the building weather it well with only a few aluminum roof panels loose or torn off. The crews were out yesterday with skid steers and tow straps tipping the young maple trees back straight and staking them back up in the upright position.
I took the chance while out in the pond in a boat to pull the diffuser and clean it. I thought it was producing a fair amount of bubbles, but the diffuser we completely caked with a clay-soilfloc mix from earlier this year. Clay usually just rubs off with a little water. This mixture however was like concrete and about 1/2" thick. How bubbles even got through that is amazing. I used my nails to gently scrape the rubber membrane and repeated washing attempts finally got it clean.
I'd like to run it right away to see how much better it works but better let the soilfloc seal and settle first. The aerator disks are on the standard vertex base and that base is screwed to a plastic tote that is 6" high. Yet it must still somehow stir up some sediment as everything down there was coated with clay/soilfloc mix. In the bottom of the picture you can make out my plastic coke bottle that also has a heavy layer of green/brown slime on it.
