Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Pond Iced Over

How long can a 2 acre pond that’s 12’ deep be 100% iced/snowed over before you’d start getting concerned?

I give my ponds a week under snow cover before blowing holes in them with shallow water aeration. YMMV.

How would you recommend that I open up my pond if I don’t have any aeration source?

See the Snow Removal Over Ice thread for starters.

I guess we will see. Mine has been inaccessible with the ATV to plow it, and too difficult to shovel off. Ice is at 11” thick with 4+” of snow on top. Hardest winter since we had the pond dug. Three weeks now under snow? 4 weeks of locked ice. We have a trickle of water coming in bearing O2, but that is mostly frozen shut.

I have a heater in the garden pond to knock a hole in the ice. It is costing me a lot in electricity to run it as it’s 750W and too cold out for it to toggle off. But it must be the only open water for some distance as the animals are drinking a lot of water from it!

There are a LOT of variables to that question. The biggest is determining what the biochemical demand is on the pond. I agree with Theo in saying after a week I will open up my pond if it has 2" ice and 2" snow, or ANY amount of ice and 2"+ snow on it. I will toggle the aeration system on and off depending on the winter storms and snow. I want to keep between 5%-10% of the pond open, or at the very least have that much clear non-snow covered ice on it.

I expect to be getting a lot of calls this Spring to stock ponds with fish that have seen a winterkill, and get a lot of inquiries about aeration systems for a pond. It's the early part of Feb and I already have orders for systems for ponds.

For people reading the forum, look at the links that Bill Cody posted elsewhere about aeration. You can aerate the pond and do it incorrectly and actually do more harm than good. There is more to aerating a pond than running air to a pond and having bubbles come up to the surface.