A quick reminder to check your aerators. I have a small pond with a single compressor running through about 80 feet of weighted line to a vertex 2 head diffuser set at about 9' of depth. It runs 12 hours a day in spring and fall, about 18 hours in summer trying to pick the cooler hours of day and overnight. My pond had been very clear with running aerator or not in the past and since water is clear i didn't think the aerator would need frequent cleaning.
It has been on my to do list to get access to a rowboat and pull up the aerator for inspection and cleaning now that it has been in the pond year around for 2 seasons. I had tied a float to some twisted plastic string trimmer line but no longer could see the float so knew it may have disintegrated in the water.
I wanted to pull it up as I have struggled with muddy water all year (never had that the first 2 years) and although I suspect it is fish that is doing the muddying of the water, I wanted to make sure the aerator was well off the bottom.
Weather in W Mi has been hot and prior to Sunday night, no rain for about 2 weeks. Water was low so I figured a good time to check on it. With my son's help we were able to snag the edge of the aerator frame with a landscape rake and pull it up. We did this while it was running (not sure if it is OK to pull a running aerator above water) but we had no way to find it otherwise.
It took quite some effort to dislodge the black plastic housing from the bottom of the pond.
I was surprised that despite the appearance of normal 'boil' in the water that at least 1/3 or maybe a bit more of the membranes were coated with a tenacious clay/sand mix. I didn't have a brush with me so just kept wetting the clay and gently scrubbing with my fingers so as to not damage the rubber but to work it loose. After some time i was able to rinse it all off
I then saw no sign of any string on the housing. I had come prepared with some string and drill bits. Thanks to others on this forum I decided to elevate the housing a bit. I didn't have an old tire but had access to large plastic totes, the rugged kind that they ship car parts around in. I chose one that had 7" sides.
First I used decking screws to screw the vertex housing to the top of the upside down plastic tote. After cleaning and attempting to lower it back down i found I had issues with the housing and the tote being top heavy and it wanted to tip over as it went down to the bottom. The tote also trapped air bubbles. Example tote attached although mine was about half that height.
I hauled it back up and put some vent holes in the side of the tote and then also carefully made a hole in the flange of the vertex housing one on each corner. I then put some poly rope on each corner to make a four cornered sling of rope. I then put another rope from the center of that knot straight up with a pop bottle tied around the neck to float above that just under the water surface.
That helped as I could now lower by holding on to the pop bottle and it stayed better balanced on the way down (the air bubbling out as well) Once about a foot off the bottom i can let it go and i can feel it self-center upright as it hit the bottom. The pop bottle floats just under the surface and now it is much easier to grab with a rake and snag the popbottle and pull it up.
It took a couple of tries to 'guess' where the middle of the pond is to get it reasonably placed again but I'm happy I have a better system to retrieve it next time I clean it and clearly the boil at the surface is bigger with more visible bubbles when looked at from close up.
The other eye-opener from this project was as i was scraping around with the landscape rake on the bottom and pulling up the aerator box I released some clumps of VERY black leaves/debris. It clearly came from the bottom of the deep end and showed that there is a layer of detritus, old leaves stuck to the bottom. And this was right at the area of the aerator. No bad smell, just very black stuff.
Also, the handle of the landscape rake was hollow. As I pushed the rake straight down to the deep i could feel very warm surface water on my hands and then felt a current of markedly colder water come around my hands. I realized this was deep water coming up the rake handle creating a siphon. I was surprised that over only about 7-8' depth and with the aerator running that we still had this much temp difference. (I'm sure the perch were appreciating the fact that they could get to a little cooler water when they wanted to during the day). I figured with a shallow pond that the warmer temp would stay pretty constant through the water column.
So, on my to do list is: 1. Clean the aerator yearly (bring a soft brush next time although fingers work well too) 2. Watch for disintegration of the rope system and if needed change to light grade cable, providing the float can still float it up in the water column. Having this 4 sided rope system very much increases ease of snagging it later.
rain stirred things up with a lot of wind yesterday. I'm going to keep the aerator off to see if we can clear the water. Meanwhile, back to trying to fish/trap/net out the bottom stirring fish.
