Pond Boss Forums POND CONSTRUCTION Creating habitat My new pond!

My pond dam is done and the water is even coming in! WHen full it should be about 1.75 acres and I plan to stock LM, BG, maybe CC and possibly some hybrid BG or red ear. It's an exciting feeling, and I'm having a blast placing cover. It's amazing how the PVC structures I made looked like a lot when they were sitting in the garage, but when I placed them in the pond they looked pretty small. Thanks to everyone on this site for all the great ideas.

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Well it looks like I botched the photo attempts. Sorry.

Hmmm, not sure about the photo addresses. I tried inserting the photo addresses and came up wthe same problem that you had above.

Anyhoo, great news on your pond!

Now on to stocking a forage base, yahoooo!

Oh and did you ever decide about the geothermal stuff?

Geothermal is a go. The loops are in the bottom of the pond. It got interesting when the contractors loops were not yet all tied in and we had an unusual winter rain here in Iowa. With the ground frozen and the rain melting all the snow on the ground I suddenly had 4'+ of water in the pond which quickly froze. The contractors had to borrow my boat, break the ice and fish the loop ends out with rakes. I enjoyed it a lot more than the geo contractor did.

I am considering putting geo loops in my lake to heat the house. Did the geo contractor give you an estimate on how much it will cool off your pond in the winter and warm it in the summer? I would imagine it doesn't change it much but I still wonder.

When we build our pond house I'm definately considering a geothermal system. The summers by us can get pretty dang hot. The Geothermal sytems seem to have a bigger cost up front buy also seem like they would pay for themselves. Any photos of the system or the installation?

Good question blair5002, I would imagine that any effect on the pond would vary a lot depending upon pond size and use of the system.

A few misc threads exist regarding temp changes in the pond from geo-loops. The bottom line was "non-issue".

I have been inspired to do some Math; I'm going to make it all non-Metric units to confuse Bruce.

Let's take a 5 ton A/C unit; IIRC that's middlin' big around here, as I think my house has a 3.5 ton unit right now.

5 tons equates to 60,000 BTUs per hour (BTU - British Thermal Unit, which, without all the fine print concerning standard temperatures and pressures, is enough to heat 1 lbs of water by 1 degree F).

Let's assign an arbitrary 50% efficiency to our 5 ton geothermal unit, which means to cool a house by 60,000 BTUs, we will assume twice that much, 120,000 BTUs is dumped into a pond.

Now, let's assume a TSP (Theo's Standard Pond, 1 acre with an average depth of 5 feet) is in play. The TSP's five acre-feet have 5x12 - 60 acre-inches of water, each containing 27,000 gallons. That's 1,620,000 gallons of water in the pond.

Water weighs 8.35 pounds per gallon, so our TSP has 8.35x1,620,000 or 13,527,000 pounds of water.

120,000 BTUs of heat dumped into the TSP would only raise the temperature by 120,000/13,527,000 = 0.009 Farenheit degrees per hour. Pretty insignificant.

Wow, it's good to have a rocket surgeon on Pond Boss. So given that my pond is 3 acres and probably average depth of 6-7 feet this is going to be a non issue at my place.

I do have some pictures of the loops going in but as you can see by my first post I'm inept at getting the pictures on here. As the professor mentioned above the loops are supposed to have a minimal effect on water temperature. I felt even safer as my contractor had trenches dug in the bottom of the pond to place the loops then cover them. The cost of the system will be about $16,000 not including the cost of the pond excavation. In my are we get rebates from the electric company of about $2,000 off the installation cost, and then they also give a discounted kwh rate for heating (have to have a seperate meter installed at a minor cost). We used propane as our heat source previously and it runs just under $2/gallon now and we've averaged around 1300 gallons per year in our house (1800' ranch with 1800' basement finished). When the pond fills and the loops can be efficiently used it's supposed to give us a heating cost equivalent to 30 cent/gallon propane. For now, until the pond fills with water we will have to run on the Geo furnace utlizing electricity only. However at the reduced electric rate it equates to 90 cent propane. So I figure the system will pay for itself in about 6 years, and pays for my pond in another 6 years if I want to look at it that way. Most importantly I now have a pond and it has a "logical" reason which helped sell it to my wife.

Well, it is International Nerd Day today.

...there are ponds without reason?

Don't sell yourself short, Theo. It has been very reassuring to know that resources of such depth, breadth, and innovation as yourself exist on this forum, and are at work in the public service of the citizens of this great land.

I have to admit that there was a time when I thought your contributions to the country might have been of a more theoretical, esoteric nature, given the somewhat abstract quality of many of your posts. However, with the deployment of the Medieval Carp Throwing Trebuchet to the Afgan theater of operations, I recognize that my reservations were unjust.

Non issue it is!! Thanks theo

nice work hersh, lets get to work on the pics!!
what an interesting topic
i too have a pond in iowa, unfortunately i still live in colorado and dont get to live on my land . YET!!
was back there last week ice fishing the crappie bite was good
caught one that went 15 inches
iowa is a great state to raise fish!!!