Pond Boss Forums GENERAL QUESTIONS Muddy water Another Muddy Pond

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You have to counter the alum with hydrated lime too. For every pound of alum, use 1/2 pound of hydrated lime. (in the pond)

The bucket test will allow you to roughly figure out how much aluminum sulfate to use.

1 acre, 12-15 feet at the deepest could require 2200 pounds of alum and 1100 pounds of hydrated lime.

Look in the Muddy water section. For the bucket test, basically you take a given volume of water and keep adding alum to it until it flocculates and precipitates the clay out of solution. You then calculate how much alum you used per gallon of water and translate that to how many gallons of water are in your pond. That will tell you how much alum to use, and you have to buffer that with 50% hydrated lime to keep the pH from crashing and killing the fish.