Looking to deice the pond can be very beneficial, let’s take a look at a couple reasons. Here at WhatPond we take one of the diffusers in the pond and move it to the dock to keep ice from building and heaving the deck up out of the pond. We’ve done this for years now and no problems with the deck.
Moving to the next reason for keeping a hole in the ice is to allow the toxic gasses that build up in the pond to escape to the open air. Plus helps reduce the chance of a winter fish kill due to the toxic gasses and depleting oxygen from the long winter.
Now let’s take a look at the actual hole in the ice. For safety sake of the fish the diffuser should placed at half the depth of the pond, this helps to not cool the pond too much that would be harmful for the fish.
The biggest question that comes up is, “how big of a hole will it make”? Sort of a loaded question but we’ll try to explain because the hole could be large or small depending on the depth of the diffuser, air temperature and if there is incoming water supplying the pond during winter.
If the pond has an inflow of water say from a spring then the hole in the ice could be bigger since the water coming form the spring would be ground temperature ranging from 45-55 degrees. Whereas if the pond is stagnate the pond will be able to cool down without the incoming water and the hole would end up being smaller.
The pictures are an example of the change in the size of the hole and the main reason is the air temp. The above picture was taken when the temp was 12 degrees the night before and the below picture the fallowing day when the temp dropped to -14 over night and held around 7 during the day, quite a big difference in size in just 24 hours.
There are reasons for keeping a hole open in the ice and we only covered that part of what an aeration system can do, so if your only need is to allow toxic gasses to escape the pond or if you want to preserve your deck you may be looking for a smaller system to do so but if you want to aerate your pond then we can help calculate and design a system that is fitted for your pond.
