Pond Boss Forums AERATION Should I aerate? Should I aerate part of Pond?

My pond is 5.5 acres the main body is square (3 acres) 10 ft deep but most is 5 or 6 ft. There are two arms off the main body the larger being about 2 acres in somewhat of a L shape. Half of this arm is very shallow 3 to 1 ft deep with the remainers being 1 to 5 ft.

There is deep muck in most of this arm and the area produces hair algae quickly. Is there any dangers in only aerating both areas of the L shape arm and advantages concerning the hair algae? In other words the main portion of the lake would get only some aeration! Thanks for any advice!

Mark:

Is it muck (derived from decomposing organic matter - leaves, etc.) or is it sediment (fine soil that washed into the area over time)?

There is plenty of sediments built up over the years as the main feeder creek is here and during heavy late spring rains one can see the brownish runoff coloring the pond progressively. However the organic muck is deep. It's black smells rotten and is at least a couple feet deep. A person would be hard pressed to get thier boots retrived recovered if stepped in, I know. Thick matts of aglae form sink and repeat again every year. These algae matts tear apart by wind/rain floating into other part of the pond also.

If money and terrain permit, to remove the muck you'd be better off dropping the water level and digging it out. Either with an excavator or a drag line. Using aeration and bacteria will take years for a partial reduction. Exactly how fast it breaks down is a "it all depends" situation.

Understood, would aeration be likely to greatly retard the algae growth?

Mark since you have a creek flowing into the pond it would be helpful to decrease future siltation by building small dams in the creek to catch alot of the silt.

As Esshup has said your gonna need some bucks to clean out a pond that large.

I have worked on the creek area to make it spread out onto a 1/3 acre sod area before entering the pond seems to have helped.

Re digging this 50 year old farm pond would be nice although unlikely. Managing the algae in this area of the pond by means other than pure (only) chemicals looks do able by aeration from a money sense. If, this method would be productive and not cause other harm to the rest of the pond?

Aeration would be a good addition, since your pond is shallow a few linear air pumps would help, they are low cost and very reliable. Here's a brand that some of us use,I use the ecoplus 5, others use the larger ecoplus 7.
http://www.aquariumspecialty.com/air-pum...ommercial-air-5
You could also buy a much larger pump and run long lines to the diffusers.

Bacteria can also be added, some people use it in conjunction with aeration.

And look into Tilapia. They will eat algae.

MarkS: we have almost the same size pond, a larger deeper pond connected to a shallow smallerpond. I added areation to the larger one which had thick black eggy muck & chocked by mat algae. The areation helps keep the algae in check, a year later I started to use Benificial bacteria to reduce the muck, now you can see stumps with roots in areas where we never knew they were! we also save $ on the chemicals we use to dump in the pond. Now we just treat for weed growth & with the addition of bacteria we cut down on the weed chemicals as well. The key is adding bacteria in spring before the weeds start to bloom. the smaller section had no change it stayed mucky & chocked with algae until I added aeration to it.

How deep is your larger deeper pond?

the larger pond is around 15 feet deep in four areas, and the rest averages 3 to 5 feet. I placed the aeration disk in the holes & it has worked wonders to this old pond.