Hi Pond Boss gurus,

I've done some research and leaning towards the Airmax PS10 for our 1/2 acre pond with a max depth of 12' in central PA. Plan to set on a timer for 15 mins/day and slowly increase (40 years of decaying leaves and I want to avoid a fish kill). Pond is 50' from our cabin, and another 80' to the deepest section.

A few questions that I'm hoping you can help answer:

1) Does this seem like the best system for my setup?
2) Is it better to run power to the pond or set up the pump near the cabin and run the air line underground in PVC?
3) Can I increase the length of the tubing to make it do the deepest section of the pond? I believe this system comes with 100'?

Thanks all.
Steve

Cheaper to run air to the pond and then split the air line to 2 Air stations in the pond than to run electric to the pond. You can run both diffusers/air stations during the summer, only run the shallow one during the winter. Forgot to add that you can use low pressure 1" poly line to bury and transition to the weighted line at the edge of the pond.

Best system? That's a loaded question. Personally I don't like air stones I prefer the flat disk type membrane diffusers. Stones you have to yank out of the pond every year, clean in muratic acid, then put them back in the pond. The round tube diffusers? Ted Lea found that they had a tendency to split. The only way to tell if the system is good enough for your pond is to calculate the lifting rate of the diffusers at depth that they will be placed. If they will bring at a minimum 1.25 times the water volume in your pond to the surface in a 24 hr period, then they will be OK.

A Vertex PondLyfe 2 system will work fine too.

Make sure you can get rebuild kits for that compressor - you will need to rebuild it sooner or later, that's the case with all compressors.

Use the 5/8" tubing vs. the 3/8".

Typical start up procedure is 15 min day 1, double run time every day until it's running 24.7. If you can go smell the boil in the pond, If it smells like rotten eggs towards of that day's run time, duplicate that run time the following day.

Thanks for the feedback esshup. I will look into the Vertex system since I am looking for a low maintenance setup.