What Should You Do About Ponds in the Heat of Summer?
Let’s go to Al in Plain Township, who asks, ‘good morning, everyone. It’s going to be in the 90s, a couple of days. And I know that sometimes my koi, they start piping. And I think I talked to you before about this. I heard, or can you do this? Can you throw, like, can I go get a bag of ice and throw a bag of ice in my pond and maybe sort of cool that water off? Or do you think an aerator on the bottom is more effective?’
So I would do the aerator as my first option. You don’t want to. I mean, ice is going to be a very, very, very, very short-term fix. And it’s going to make the water drop in temperature very quickly, which isn’t great for the fish. We want the water to be cooler and better oxygenated. But we don’t want to massively change the fishes and the fish environment.
So I would recommend a couple of different things. You could use an aerator, put that air stone down in the pond. That’ll force a little bit more oxygen into that water. Because warm water, as you know, holds less oxygen than cold water. And for those that are reading that don’t know what piping is, piping is where the fish come to the surface. Like they’re gasping for air.
And so when you see your fish piping, it means the oxygen level is going down lower. And by adding an aerator, you can force oxygen back in the water. The other thing I’ve seen people do that’s very effective is get one of those, depending And they’ll actually put that pop-up tent over top of the pond that creates shade. Any way you can shade the pond, you’re keeping that water 10 to 15 degrees cooler. And that will help that water hold more oxygen.
Your pump runs 24-7, which is ideal. Because I have talked with folks that say ‘oh, I just run it in the daytime when I’m there to see it.’ Well, at night time, that’s when the oxygen level drops the lowest. So we want to make sure that the pump and the filter system runs 24 hours a day.
And then the aerator can be one of those additional things you can add, maybe at the other end of the pond, where your oxygen isn’t as high as right by the falls. You’ll also see them when the water gets hot. They’ll kind of congregate underneath those waterfalls, because that’s where the oxygen level is the highest.
Managing Algae in the Heat
So algae is always something that happens in the pond. It’s just when we have a ton of sunlight and warm water that algae reproduces, if we put plant material in there, the plants use that nutrients up.
Algae is kind of like the last thing in the food chain to get the nutrients. So if we could put these other plants in there first, they consume the nutrients, the algae starves and the water clarifies. There are other options though, if you didn’t want to go the route of plants, there’s ultraviolet light clarifiers and a UV light basically kills a single cell of algaes and then they clump together and they get stuck in the filter pad.
So the water can clarify that way as well. We do have more and more customers that are going that route because early in the spring when it’s cold, the plants don’t grow. Well, algae will. So it keeps the water crystal clear year-round by using an ultraviolet clarifier.
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