Keeping Your Pond From Freezing Completely Over

For your ponds, make sure that the heater and your aerators are working. I had a guy in the nursery just a day or two ago, and his heater had quit working. So we were able to get him a fresh heater, get it back in the pond, and get that opening in the ice again. If you’re just running aeration as we hit single digits here, the pond is gonna freeze over. As long as the aerator’s running underneath the ice, the ice is clear enough usually you can see bubbles still coming up, then it’s okay.

The old mindset was to just run a heater, and that opening in the ice allowed any methane gas to escape. Methane comes from the rotting fish waste or any plant material or leaves as they decay. That methane builds up, that methane will absorb the oxygen, now It’s in competition for breathing oxygen in the water, and then the fish don’t win that battle.

Running an aerator is a little different. They use like five watts of power instead of, you know, 700 watts of power, so when you have a heater plugged in that runs continuously, it’s a significant electric bill. The aerator, you won’t even know it’s plugged in on your electric bill. You’re looking at a quarter a month to run it. The aerator brings warm water to the surface and keeps an opening in the ice as well.  

Now when we hit single digits, as the bubbles burst at the surface, even though they’re teeny tiny micro bubbles, it freezes a dome. But you have to remember now that water, as it comes to the surface, is exposed to 32 degree ice, not negative 10 degree air. So it actually insulates the pond by freezing, and as long as the oxygen is being put back in the water underneath, that methane isn’t going to build up. It’s not going to hurt the fish. There’s no competition for breathing oxygen.

Normally here in Ohio they recommend heating or aeration, but anybody that’s got an investment in their fish or a personal attachment to them, which does happen, I recommend running both, that way you have redundancy. The other thing I recommend is running them off two different GFI circuits. If your heater goes bad and it kicks the GFI off, and the aerators plugged in there, you lost them both. So if you can, run them in different circuits. 

The heater I would run to wherever you have your pump cord plugged in, and then the aerator could be run on an extension cord because it’s pulling such a small amount of electricity. It’s easier to run that on an extension cord, but having them plugged into two different GFIs creates redundancy. More things have to fail for there to be a catastrophic problem.

If it does freeze over, banging a hole in the ice is not ideal. This is magnified tenfold when you bang on it, and the whole top of the pond is solid. It sends shockwaves down through the water that can mess with the dormant state of the fish in the water. So the best way, like this gentleman, with his heater that quit working, of course, it froze solid in the pond. Now he had an aerator too, so he had that redundancy. He wanted to put another heater back in there, and so I told him to take a pot of boiling water, of course be careful where you’re walking with a boiling pot of water, and set it on top of the ice. Don’t dump it out. Set the pot of boiling water on the ice, and that hot metal will go down through and create an opening. So there’s no shockwaves going through the water. It’ll slowly hold down through the ice and allow you to put that heater back in, and that heater will open up that hole again.

The best way to do it without having any problems. Let the other one that’s in there stay in there, stay frozen in. It won’t hurt anything staying frozen in the ice. Best not to disturb the fish. When we warm back up and have a thought then you can pull that heater back. 

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