Opening Up Your Ponds & Waiting on Algaecide

It’s time to get the ponds opened up. We started opening up a lot of our customers’ ponds the last two weeks here, and the goal is to try to have them all opened up by the first week of May as we continue to warm up.

We got the waterfalls fired up last week and there’s a process of cleaning. You know, we shut those pumps off back in November. And so there’s algae growth that happens in the pond over the winter time.

The first week when we fire the pumps back up, we don’t do a whole lot to the pond as far as adding chemicals. We want the water to be really well oxygenated again. After a few days, then we’ll add some algae killer and we’re going to add the right amount of algae killer.  I will put this word of caution out there. Do not put an algaecide in the day you open your pond up. You want to let the pond run for a while. The algaecide is going to do its job. It’s going to go in there, and it’s going to kill all the algae.

Please read the directions on the bottle. It works really well. And if you have fish in the pond and you double the dose, it’s going to kill all the algae really quickly, which sounds great. But in the decomposition process, that algae consumes oxygen out of the water and now it’s competing with the fish for the oxygen they need to breathe. It didn’t get green overnight. It’s going to take a couple of weeks to clean it back up. It’s not a big deal. We don’t want to start from an oxygenated, deprived water system and then take even more oxygen out of it with killing the algae.

So I would definitely let it run 24, 48 hours minimum before I would make that first algae treatment. You can add beneficial bacteria. It’s highly recommended if you add that this time of year. The cold winter does kill some of the bacteria out of the water column, so we want to add that back in. And a small bottle will treat most ponds for a whole year. So you don’t need a lot of it.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).