Pond Boss Forums AERATION Systems questions Aeration in Cave Country

Greetings from Kentucky.

I live in a Karst area where building ponds that don't develope a hole to drain into the underlying cave systems is a real challenge.

I am gravity feeding two springs [2 to 3 GPM each] into a .9 surface acre lake that is 4 feet deep at the max and averages 2' deep. I have been told that the surface area to depth ratio is such that aeration should not be a problem. Do you agree?

Currently, I dump the spring water onto rocks and generate some bubbles [mix some air] before it goes into the pond. Please suggest any better ways to mix air into the spring water?

Thanks in advance and have a great day.

KYwonderer:

Greetings and welcome to the forum! It is always good to have another Bluegrass state member. The Gallus family left Lousiville for Ohio just over a hundred years ago. (You're very welcome.)

Your current spring water aeration practice sounds much better than doing nothing. In general, the higher the % of the water exposed to air, for as long as possible, the more O2 will be dissolved in it. What kind of delivery system (dribbles over the ground, flows at a moderate rate through pipes, ???) do you have for the spring water? Some of our resident tinkerers may come up with ingenious ways to get even more oxygen into the spring water.

It sounds like you have a very shallow pond indeed. Could you tell us what your use(s) of it are? What fish species are in it, do you feed them, water clarity, aquatic plants present, etc.? I think it would be correct that the fairly shallow water is likely to have decent O2 in it in the daytime during warm months since it is shallow enough to have plants in the entire volume of the pond. However, if the biomass of plants and fish were high enough, the increased biological oxygen demand at night could potentially cause problems under certain weather conditions. And you are probably more susceptible to Winterkill than a deeper pond would be, so letting some sunlight in to the pond in the Winter if there were extended periods of snow cover (like, over a week) would probably be important for this pond.

Thanks Theo,

Around 1900 this pond was a corn field that became too wet to farm and then began holding water on it's own.

It was its current size and depth when I learned to fish and swim in it during the late forties.

During the late sixties it dried up and when we came back to Kentucky around 1990 it was cleaned to the original size and depth, filled and restocked.

We then piped a cave spring where the water is exposed to the air about 700 feet and dump it into 1/2 of a 12" plastic ribbed culvert pipe, 10' long. The water ripples over the ribs and rocks we have placed in the pipe. Since this water is exposed both inside the cave as well as at the pond we have felt its aeration is OK.

The second spring is captued at a rock face and piped about 1100 feet. The water passes through two 300 gal. stock tanks {read: briefly exposed to air} before dumping into another 10 foot long 1/2 section of ribbed pipe filled with rocks.

The pond has always grown decent bg and lmb. Weed control is on going but managable. The 54 degree spring water and setting very low in a valley keeps the winter ice at a few inches and only for a few days at a time.

It seems we lost the lmb during last years severe drought. However bg, gsf and cc made it through the level dropping to only 18". We have restocked bg, cc, and lmb both last fall and this spring.

We have been reading this excellent forum for 6 months and have started and/or improved our structure, feeding, weed control etc. practices. My plan is to grow large bg and control the gsf by over stocking and stunting lmb. My goal is to have monster bg's pry the fly rod from my trembling hands.

We have three other shallow ponds [under 1 acre each] that we are managing.

Any advise you could offer will certainly be appreciated.

Hello KYwonderer, and welcome.
If your looking for an aerator for shallow water there's a great little linear pump from Aquarium Specialty. I just purchased one ,and put it into my trout pond. It's the EcoPlus AIR 5, for $69.95.
It puts out 3.11 CFM, at 4.2 PSI. I have it set on a timer to run from 10pm to 6am so that it can help cool the pond. I'll also use it in the winter to keep a hole in the ice.
Take a look it might be something you can use.

Current aeration of the first spring's water sounds pretty good. The second could be improved, as you noted.