Originally Posted By: esshup
I'd like to see how coarser bubbles would affect the size of the holes (coarser bubbles = bigger waves fro the bubbles hitting the surface). Also, in your pond, I would make sure the diffusers for the winter are set no deeper than 1/4 the total pond depth. Two reasons:
1) Leave a warmer water refuge for the fish (39°F-40°F)
2) That *should* possibly translate to warmer water being brought up to the surface than what you are seeing now, and that warmer water will melt ice faster, even 1°F warmer than what you are seeing now.

I'll take a picture of what my single diffuser "plume" looks like in the winter - it's at 3' below the surface in 10' of water right now. After doing a test with the Vertex diffuser disk, I swapped it out for a what I believe is a matala disk that I only run in the winter because it has a much coarser looking bubble plume. I've had this disk for quite a few years and don't remember who the mfg. is, all I know is that the winter diffuser is NOT from Vertex. I do have some diffuser disks here from MNFish, if the pond isn't frozen over I may get time to swap it out and get a picture.

Unfortunately there isn't any ice on the pond now, or if there is, it's only a skim coating - there wasn't any ice on it yesterday, don't know about today.

Are you running the Vertex disks, if not, which ones, and how many CFM are you running through each disk now?


As usual Scott, spot on as I experienced. For me, I have tried to maximizing water movement (maintaining open water to atmosphere) while using the least amount of Watts to do it. After trying to commercialize my solar aerator design, I learned in the cold regions of central MN, keeping open water was very difficult. With the energy and cost constraints, I could not prevent ice doming from happening. In fact, ice doming happened on every one of the 8 test units installed.

I shut down the development, other than my ponds, because of lack of market interest. But before I shut it down, I did do some development on simple concepts that would prevent the ice from pushing up. I hope to build and test one of those concepts for Jr this winter. Not sure how to post pics here any more but Chad maybe you could post the sketch I sent you so everybody can see it. Any and all ideas/comments/questions would be welcome. I have some testing on a similar concept from last winter. The results looked promising but again didn't go very far with it.