Aerators, Heaters, and Winterizing Your Ponds
Where are we with all of the ponds this time of year?
By now most people have got them shut down, we do. I mean there’s different ways to winter stuff over, but at Rohr’s we recommend you shut the pumps off and you put an aerator outside the pond and just run an air stone down in the pond that creates water circulation.
It’s very important that we stop feeding the fish for at least two weeks before we shut the pumps down. The pumps run the filter system, so you want to make sure the fish has time to process what he ate and you do not want to feed them once you shut the pumps down. That’s very important. Some people think, ‘oh I’m hurting the fish, I’m starving the fish.’
What happens is their digestive tract shuts down all the enzymes, bacteria that break that food down, become inactive. The fish is instinctive so a lot of times it will still go to eat, but it can’t really process that so it can cause bloat and some other issues with the fish. So you definitely want to stop feeding them.
There’s enough algae. Like when we eat a salad, it’s very easy for our bodies to digest it. That’s what the algae is for the fish. The fish food pellets are kind of like us eating a steak, and so it takes a little bit more energy to break that down. We want the fish to be dormant this time of year. If they’re hungry they can eat a salad in the pond, they’ll be fine with that.
That leaf net should definitely be on there. If you’re running behind, try to take a regular pond net and net all the leaves that have gotten in ahead of you out of the pond. You don’t want that organic material breaking down in there because it can basically create ammonia in the water column, which is a waste level, and we don’t want that. Then the net will keep any new leaves from blowing in.
There are pond heaters as well, and a lot of times what we’ll do if somebody has a large collection of fish, or has an emotional attachment, or a significant amount of money spent on their fish, we’ll run both a heater and an aerator. Now people are under the misconception that a heater heats the whole pond, it doesn’t. It keeps an opening in the ice. The aerator will keep an opening in the ice as well, so a lot of times we’ll put the heater above the air stone. Most heaters have a thermostat in them where they only turn on when they need to, and so by running that air stone underneath of it we’re bringing that warm water to the surface the heater will turn on a lot less.
Most heaters are going to be a thousand watts, that’s 60-70 bucks a month of power to run that heater. Most aerators use five watts. You won’t even know the thing is plugged in, a nickel a month in power. So the aerator does more for keeping oxygen in the water than the heater does, the heater will let natural oxygen exchange at the surface and the aerator forces it into the water. We need to make sure that the fish have oxygen to breathe in the wintertime, so that’s the aerator’s purpose.
Now places like Congress Lake, they’ve got big aeration discs down in their big lake and that’s why they can hold more fish per acre than most places. It’s less pretty than the fountains. The fountains do some aeration, but they’re more of a showpiece on the top of the water, where the air stone goes down to the bottom. The bubbles that come to the surface, that’s actually the most functional way to put oxygen in the water.
All the pond product is in our greenhouse, people in the store think we’ve gotten rid of it, but we just store it in the greenhouse, ready for anything you might need.
Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).
