Pond Boss Forums AERATION Should I aerate? Rainbows /air or not?

Last year lost trout on 7/8when surface got to 78 and 8 ft was 61 and 12ft and below was at 54 to 53... This year Right now Iam at 63 at surface and 53 8 feet down.. Havent check 12 feet below yet.. Do you think that running air for 4 to 6 hours at night this year will give me a chance to let Trout survive this summer? And at what point should I start running air if So? Spoke with sue last summer briefly and she informed me to run the air stone in the 8 foot depth... Any imput would be great.. The pond is a half-acre with the deepest .17 feet deep springfed at a mere 300 gallons an hour.. And I forgot to say last year I used crystal blue in my water clarity was a lot less than this year.. This year I can see down about 4 to 6 feet versus last year one or two feet..

To quote a wise man here named Bill Cody: "It all depends." Hard to say really. Obviously your water is cold enough farther down but apparently that coldwater became oxygen depleted last summer. One thing you may have going for you is last summer was an exceptionally hot summer.

As you elude to you want to run it just enough to add oxygen to the colder deep water without breaking up the thermocline and warming the entire pond.

In my smaller trout pond I crank up my diffuser as soon as it gets dark and then shut it off a sunrise. However I'm running in 45 gpm and my pond is much smaller than yours at 1/10th acre. That's 64,800 gallons of 51.6 F. water every 24 hours and the pond is only 100,000 gallons. That keeps the surface waters no higher than the mid 60's in the hottest part of the summer.

I hate to say it but you may just have to make a WAG and run with it. 4 to 6 hours sounds like as good an idea as any. I wish there was some kind of program or calculations one could do to determine air time based on various variables but I'm not aware of any. There are people out there with the skills but they probably work for NASA. LOL

Your best option would be hypolimnetic aeration but I don't know much about it other than it's adding enough air to aerate the hypolimnion layer, but not disrupt the stratification of the pond. Esshup is experimenting with it. Perhaps he can give you some ideas?

Thanks Cecil , was hoping this year with clarity much much better more do2 deeper. I will not use crystal blue again in pond.. Looks nice but last year weeds only grew about 4 ft down vers before dye weeds grew 8 to 9 ft down.. Hope esshup gets the system dailed in....