Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations confusing water temps

with this heat i wondered how warm my water was. went out after sunset last night and took temps of the dock on north pond. at 1 ft of water it was 80 at 2 foot it was 75 3 ft was 71 4ft was 65. so i turned on my air that i have set at five foot to see how much it would cool over night. this moring at sunrise i took temps at the same spot. at 1 ft was 80 at 2 ft was 80 at 3 ft was 79 at 4 ft was 79. thats a 14 degree temp rise at 4ft. that was very concerning. shut the air off and will go out tonight and see if temp dropped or went up in this heat. fish all seem fine. bass where aggressively chasing and eating bait fish this morning. should i stop putting in air ? already stopped feeding bait fish. this hot weather is kinda scary.

chuck, aeration is going to mix the entire column.. and depending on where you are in our great state, it may not cool the surface. 79 is a very comfortable temp for most species in KS waters, I wouldn't be concerned with that, the temps shouldn't vary much with good aeration, properly run.
Just because it's cooler doesn't mean there is more O2 present, It's actually more important to keep the hypolimniom from forming which contains the hydrogen sulfide in that anoxic layer.
If you'll share your species and part of KS, we can tell you if there's an issue, but I wouldn't stop running at night with those temps, in fact I would be quite happy with that.

i live 13 miles northwest of clay center ks. it's in the north central part of the state about 35 miles from the nebraska state line. both ponds have large mouth bass bluegill silver shiners perch and other small bait fish that come up from the river when it floods plus 2 big grass carp in each pond. both ponds are about half full but still have 6 to 12 ft of water in both.

Everything you list there is well suited to 80 deg water as long as the O2 level is adequate.
I would recommend you continue to aerate at night to keep temps stable but O2 levels up in a decent range. Also keep in mind we are loosing 2-3 minutes of day length (Read solar energy) now, so temps should start to show a slow trend back the other way.
I have a customer up by Concordia that I will be delivering fish to in the next 30-40 days, I'll PM you and we can get eyes on it if you'd like while I'm up there, but the temps you list don't worry me at all.

thanks for the quick repley. i will keep the air flow going at night. i work from home so anytime is good. be nice to get an expert out here to see if i'm doing everything right.

There's always room for interpretation of "right" :-))

update. last night water temps were 91 90 89 86. this moring it was 89 89 89 89. with half a dozen dead bluegill on top guessing theres more on the bottom that haven't floated up yet. ponds going down about 2 inches per day. pond is 26 years old and have never seen evaporation rates like this. next 4 days temps are going to be over 110. would it help if i put the air in 3ft of water instead of 5ft. the south pond is staying about 5 to 10 degrees cooler because i add 5000 gallons of well water everyday. there's no way to get the well water to the north pond.

Another thing you could do is run only from 3am to 7am
I looked your weather up, temps were 84 at 4am, 81 -5am 78-6am 77-7am, back up to 85 by 8am.
I believe I would pull aeration shallower but only run 4 to 7am.
How far is pond from water source?

the well is about 125 yards from the north pond but ponds are stacked back to back and the well is 20ft from the middle of south pond and there's no way to get the 2 inch pipe across the south pond. i tried using a sump pump to move water from the back end of south pond to north pond but water was very hot and didn't make any difference. i will move air to 3ft and run air like you suggested. would it help to freeze 5 gal buckets of water in deep freeze and put in pond at dark? i went and looked at my neighbors pond this morning about half mile from me and it has a complete fish kill with the deepest water at 3ft. some of the other ponds around here are gone but there ponds were made for cattle my ponds were made for fishing with still good deep water.

Ok, 350' of hose would just be a heat exchanger and water would be the same or higher than pond temp by the time it got there.
Move diffuser shallower and this might be a good time to engineer an underground supply line to the second pond for drought AND temp control.
I'm not sure the 5gal ice chunk would make much difference, it would be like an ice cube from your ice maker in a 10gal container.

I will let someone other than I do the math to see how much ice is needed. I'm lucky if I can do simple multiplication and I might need my fingers and toes to do it. Anyway.....

To drop water 10°F, you need 1/2# of ice per gallon of water.

That would be 122,250lbs of ice to drop 1.5ac ft 5 degs...

Which would be 14,658 gallons of frozen water..

SO YOUR TELLING ME THERE'S A CHANCE !!!

Call Hilke's in Freeburg. They'll send as many truckloads of ice as you've got room for in your wallet. lol