Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Trout Success in 2006!

Fellow Pond Bosses:
Sharing Rainbow Trout success in 2006! Stocked my 1/3 acre pond in West Branch, MI in early April with 200 10-11" rainbow trout. Deepest section 9 ft., avg. depths of 5-6 ft. Artesian well of 15 gpm at 48 degrees.

Struggled with rising temps through May and June. Had a new 2" well dug and started pumping more cold water. Combined cold water input at about 28 gpm of artesian and pumped well. Temps rose as high as 73 at one point. Must have been some cold pockets or they just hung out near the well input. Teetering on the edge for sure! Added temp controller on aerator to turn on when it dropped below 62 degrees. That really helped to cool things down at night and cooler mornings. Survived the 95 degree days in July! Auto feeder with Silver cup trout pellets 5.5mm.

And voila', we have 19" 3lb. 6oz rainbows (just caught a few on 10/28! This pic is from later July, 2 lb. 14oz, 18"! Pond Boss really helped out in the learning curve. THANKS [img]http://www.protopage.com/ebaughfamilycampground[/img] POND BOSS!

Good job !! Would like to see the pics but we have the red X box. Were the water temps to 73 at all depths or just surface. What about summer DO levels ?

Glad to hear about those tech. to get you thru. Not so lucky with the drought in GA most all ponds lost their trout and even mtn streams and one state hatchery lost all their fish. Problem now is we have lots sold and a limited supply thus higher price coming out of western NC.

That's great news, indeed, about your trout!

... But I was wondering: Did your aeration come on when the air temperature or water temperature got down below 62 degrees? And, why at that temperature -- or why not run the aeration 24/7 ?

Sorry that I can't seem to figure out how to post a photo, since I just want to attache them. I'll try to figure it out and post them.

AS you likely know, keeping cold water temps is survival for trout (below 72), so we used the aerator for two puroposes, #1 aeration and #2 for automated cooling. We studied three previous years of internet weather high / low temps for all days in May through September to look at trends. We found that more than half of the eveing low temps historically drop below 62 degrees. With that data, we installed a Ranco 220 volt thermostat from ACF greenhouse supply http://www.littlegreenhouse.com/accessory/controls.shtml
for $75. This gives us the ability to set the "heat cycle" to turn on the aerator at whatever tmep and off when it rises to another temp. In practice, we used this to turn on the aerator when it reached 62 degrees and off at 65 degrees (later set to 65 during peak summer heat period).
So, it not only aerated, primarily at night, but it cooled the pond exposing the bottom water to the cooler air temps at night.

One time I recall it dropped from 85 in the day to 40 at night and actually cooled the total pond by a full 2 degrees in just one night. We believe this was an essential part of the solution to keeping pond temps within the survival range. Does that answer your question?

Good info Michael and congrats on summering over your trout. I am gonna buy some trout next week for the winter, I to hope they make it threw the summer and this info you provided will help. My pond is spring fed so maybe they have a chance, I am only gonna put 20 or 30 in. The browns can handle a bit higher temps, if I can het them I will if not it will be rainbows.

Yes, indeed! You had great game plan in advance. My learning curve involved a lot more trial and error (mostly the latter!). I'm thinking of switching my aeration next summer to night-time only -- in part to save a few $$ on summer electric and AC bills.
Sounds like you have a great trout pond. Keep us up to date on it!

Why not run aerator 24/7?
Answer- there are times and nights when the air temps are 75, 80, or even 85 degrees. Anytime you run a trout pond aerator when air temps are that high, you are convection warming the pond. If the bottom water temp is 68 and the air temp is 80, you will add max. thermal energy into the pond- bad idea. We could have safely run the aertor ON when it dropped below 68 and off at 70, but we wanted max. cooling times.

We ran aerator 24/7 4 years ago when we first stocked rainbows and the temp lept rapidly rising and by July 4th it reached 75 degrees and allthe trout went psychotic (circling like sharks) and died within a few hours. Steep learning curve in this.

What I've learned is to first protect DO levles and a close second- protect water temps.

We measured as high as 73 at the BOTTOM during one week in the deepest areas. That was pretty scary, as trout most often don't survive after 70-72! It is likely that the newly installed well pumping another 20 gpm of 48 degree water was creating some coller pockets where they hung out. Also- since the aerator was working more than half the days, we never had only a little stratification. During one hot period, it was 72 at surface and 69 on the bottom-fyi.

Finally, summer DO levels were measured infrequently and ran at 10-11 ppm 1 ft. below surface. This never varied to much- good news.
From the Trout master, Cecil Barid, I learned earlier in the year that DO levels are more important than temp, but the catch 22 is that when the temps get too high (like 72) the water is unlikely to hold much DO, and they tend to suffocate before getting heat stressed.

Micheal, back before the NE G & P forum got shut down there was an interesting thread about a "strange pond" in south central NE with trout in it. The trout were surviving the summer heat there due to a submerged irrigation pipe running through the center of the pond that was kept running and it left cold pocket surrounding the pipe that trout stayed very near too. If you were to run a sytem like Bruce's horizontal aeration system with submered irrigation pipe in the pond before the pumping well water into it this should gaurantee a much larger area of cold pockets during the summer heat. On the flip side running the same system during the winter time could also create realtively warmer pockets that might help improve growth rates. The concept is not much different than an air conditing coil. Thoughts?

Shorty that is a great idea !!! You could even put a T to a small 1/2in line with a pressure regulator to an underwater horz. aeration outlet so that the size of the cold/warm spot was bigger. Inject 5 gal. per min out of a total of 6 nozzles in different directions in the horz. plane at the main pipe depth of cold (warm in winter) aerated water and you would always have a sweet spot thermal refuge.

Key question about submerged irrigation pipe idea:
Since arteisan / well water is devoid of completely devoid of D.O., how would you areate it first and then re-pressurize it to push it to the bottom etc. Or do you not view zero DO of all this new water a problem???

Michael,

Thank you for the kinds words calling me the "Trout master." However, let's hold off until I am able to produce my own! That to me will be the epitamy of raising my own trout.

If anything I believe I have learned from you. I have been unpluging and pluging in my aerator at dawn and dusk but I like your idea of a thermostat shutoff.

Micheal, the well water running through the pipe should be 55 degrees or less, this would act like an air conditioning coil if it was submerged in your pond cooling the surrounding water before it actually entered into your pond elsewhere, thus creating a temperature sweet spot next to the pipe. With the horizontal aeration technique ewest mentioned you would aerate the incoming water by having the the jets pointed horizontally along the surface to disturb the surface as it mixed with the existing pond water. Bruce can explain his horizonatal aeration technique much better than I can as he has been experimenting with sweeper nozzles and his well water to aerate his ponds with great success. Basically it's the motion of the incoming water distrubing the surface water of your pond that faciltates a high oxygen transfer rate into the water. The more water that is disturbed by the motion and exposed to the air, the higher rate of transfer there is.

In northern climates this could also be used in reverse in creating warm pockets in the winter time which might improve growth rates on species like yellow perch if you could create warm pockets that were 5-10 degrees above your winter time norms in the deeper areas of your pond. Basically you would be using the submereged pipe to thermally transfer the well water temp before the water actually makes into your pond. Just so you know, this is just an idea based on the "strange pond" thread I saw earlier this summer. South central NE is not a place where trout could actually survive very well in the summer without some help, daytime highs are in the 90's and 100's with lows at night in the mid 80's.

Ok- I get the idea now- thanks for clarifying the "coil" thermal transfer idea. Seems like I would need a high thermal transfer pipe material like copper and lots of length of piping to get enough transfer to make it work. PVC would insulate too much to work. I like the idea- could take some engineering to make it work right. Thanks for the ideas! I thought that the ultimate pond cooling / warming would be to actually trench a geothermal line (6ft. under) and about 700 ft loop and actually pump pond water slowly through the line and then back into the pond. In summer you get cooling to 50 degrees (in Michigan) and warming up to 50 in winter. Of course, you're going to pay probably $10,000 for all that deep trenching and pipe laying adn pump etc., but it is an interesting idea.

CECIL:
Any guy who can get monster browns from a 1/10 acre pond is the Trout Master! Re: unplugging and plugging in the aerator vs a thermostat- you gotta check this Ranco $75 thermostat out- it works wonderfully! I've been using it since June. It has a 6ft. lead wire and sensor on the end.

My interim solution wa to put a 220 volt capable mechanical timer on the aerator- for night - time aeration and cooling. BUT, problem being, I live two hours away and even if you are on-site, who has the time to constantly monitor and guess how hot it might stay at midnight on those blistering summer nights, where you don't want it on and would have to manually unplug it etc.

So- with the night-time only aeration technique, I could still be warming my pond up 1-2 degrees in one night IF the temp stayed up at 85 and my pond was at 65 (a 20 degree difference from water temp!) and churning the convection oven- OUCH! By installing a RANCO thermostat, see ACF greenhouse supply link listed in previous posting above, then I can adjust the upper threshold of turn ON of aeration just a few times during the summer season.

Here's the basic setings I worked with:
Water temp = 60 / aeration ON at 58 or lower
Water temp = 65 / aeration ON at 63 / Off at 65
Water Temp = 70 / aeration ON at 65 / Off at 68

For Fall / Winter my new strategy is:
Water temp is currently 44!
ON at 37 (or lower) and off at 40 or higher
Idea here is - why run it 24 / 7 when water is holding full DO saturation with no risk of low DO and lots of seasonal trunover with wind, rain and snow and falling temps etc. And, it is set to keep the ice off. Anyway, we'll see how that works- always lots of learning to do.

I plan on raising it up in March to ON at 60 or lower and OFF at 62, to actually bring up the water temp closer to the optimum growth temp of 55-65- on those warmer days etc. Your thoughts?

I thought one of the water sources was aerated.

Thinking out loud here. If water is not aerated then you could put the sprayer (sweeper nozzles) near the surface so the cold aerated water would sink over the pipe length or you could submerge it so that it sprays directly over the air stream from the diffuser or you could put an air line into the head of the pipe or into the sweeper nozzle pipe T. What kind of pressures are on the well flow lines ?

Here's the photo:
[IMG] [img=http://img174.imageshack.us/img174/1489/paulstephenphotoav2.th.jpg] [/IMG]

Very nice trout Michael!

Yes indeed and friends to go along with it.

Can't wait to see what they look like another year from now.

Mike,

I typically don't run my well or my aeration at all in winter. Like you said D.O. is so high, and due to the low temps metabolism of the fish is really low. I don't even feed them much if at all so no waste or ammonia problems. I do set a diffuser in shallow water just in case we get heavy snow over thin ice and I can't get on to keep the snow off. Otherwise I don't aerate at all in winter and just keep the snow off. The trout do just fine under the ice. However you being 2 hours away you may not have that option.

Hi Ewest and all, My name is Paul Ebaugh and Michael's brother and co-conspirator on the pond management. The original artesian well has a pressure head of approx 6' of water column. We had another well dug about 30' away and it only has a 1-2 foot pressure head. This second well we put a 3/4 HP pump on it and with the pump on it flows approx 25 gpm and the first well drops to 8-10 gpm. With the pump on we can acheive up to approx 30 psi of pressure if the flow is reduced. The second well with the pump is about 3' above water level so its flow churns the water quite a bit to get some aeration action.

Note for Michael: The reason you cannot put the pump inlet directly on the outer well pipe (2") is that if and when the pump starts sucking air, you lose the pump prime and if run for any significant time dry it will burn out the pump and notor. The inlet pipe currently has about 20' of PVC to get near the bottom of the well with a shoe valve (check-valve) at the end. This 20' column will always stay full of water and not allow the pump to lose its prime. As you found out when removing the pipe, it gets very heavy full of water. In future years we can keep this in place and when winterizing, pump out about 5-10 feet of the water column and cap off. At 5-10 feet down and with the well flowing around the casing at 5 gpm in artesian mode at 47 degrees it will not freeze.

OK heads up all you engineers. Lets see if you can help the Ebaughs figure out a way to inject air into their well flow if they want to. Most of the info is above. If they decide to use horizontal aeration at depth with some of the cool well water how can they easily aerate it.

If the casings are big enough, they could run a compressor line down each one to inject air at depth. It would raise the dissolved O2 somewhat at least before the water comes out of the wells. If there's enough room to get some small diffusers down inside it would oxygenate much more efficiently, but a bunch of pinholes in an airline (plugged at the bottom?) dropped down vertically would be better than nothing.

Not sure I'd recommend injecting air into the well flow. Problem is you need to blow off nitrogen gas and possibly hydrogen sulfide gas. That has to be open air. Nitrogen gas is supersaturated in well water and needs to be reduced.

Here in Indiana one trout pond owner increased his flow this year and was just dumping his well water into the pond. The trout come up to the area of the inflow and many were croaking. My guess is they are coming up close during hot weather, but the D.O. level was too low in the well water, and there could have been some hydrogen sulfide that wasn't being blown off along with some nitrogen.

IMHO dropping the water via gravity through a packed column is the way to go. However, seems to me you guys are doing O.K. with what you are doing. If it ain't broke don't fix it...

What kind of temperature change do you get while running well water through your aeration column, Cecil?