Pond construction begins

[koifishgirl]

I am only going to have room for three more ponds in fenced in area, if I can get that many, since my space is going to be limited how deep do you think I should make the other ponds. I want to have some room to grow some of the special koi that I keep. I will also need one pond to house the parent koi. No more than 12 parent koi, what size and depth would be ok. for them?

[ranskye]

i have used ponds of about 1.8m deep. no problem, these were fed pellets and could get some stuff off the bottom of the pond casue the netting touched.

these ponds were about 3 times as big as what you are doing and hold typically over 200 big koi and 2000 plus full size goldfish. so your talking of well over a tonne of fish, maybe two. this involved water changes when needed and typically a drop of the rubbish water in those ag pipes weekly. never really lost fish but sometimes they ran out of air after cloudy periods, beleive it or not there was no aeration for years with half that stocking still atleast.

youd do fine with a five to six foot deep pond. if it dont look after your good koi better than a fingerling pond would in the same surface area but shallower id be very very surprised. i dont think youll be stocking them too heavy, they ought to grow pretty quick, though if i were you and you want them to grow quicker and not worry that you may lose a 5000 dollar fish.. then id pay the money for air lifts atleast. if i could show you a photo of the pond depth that i used for fingerlings production and the farm is still rather profitable then it may take away the notion that 6 foot deep is no good.
for bigger fish, id rather them deeper for the stability they offer.

[koifishgirl]

Ill do that. I will be putting in my water pipes this weekend to the ponds with the cut off so I can control each pond. Ill get some pic and post and if I have done anything wrong how about letting me know. All the 4 inch pipe that is in the ground will be caped off for later use in case I need them.

[gregbickal]

Cool. I hope you have great luck and lots of babies !!

[Maurice]

Liming, that's just what I've been doing today.

I have no need to add lime for any buffering capacity, it’s purely for burning out anything left in the clay.

First I dry the ponds, just enough to get the cultivator in and break the clay. Then they are left drying as long as possible, I may go over several more times with the cultivator to get air into the clay.

Then just a few days before filling I apply lime by the shovel from my wheelbarrow. Enough to make it look like it’s snowed, but only a sprinkling. Then I go over again with the cultivator and finally track the pond in with the mini digger.

A rare picture of me at work, I'm normally behind the camera.



Just a couple of days away! A little more water and a couple more degrees.

The 6 pond which did not get finished last year are this. More culling!
Maurice.

[ranskye]

kfg, good to hear your putting in the four inch cap pipes, i bet theyll come in handy later on. save you a lot of time and pumping drama for sure.
its even possible to use an angle and a lenght and a screen to get them to clean out you sump area of its mud/crud.

i cant rememebr what you were dong in regards to aeration but ive seen a system using the seimens blowers. it worked beautifully and they are very long lasting. its no the best way of adding 02 but you might employ one to run a few lifts in a few ponds.. you can run the line along the front and us electrical conduits to suck the water from a depth or even further away from the front run off air pipe.. for example you can put one pipe near vertical one running form half way back the pond and one running from the rear. its a releatively cheap simple way of getting stirring and o2 happening.

im waiting for a new type of aerator to hit production and ill let you know about it when its there.
hey steve hows things with the little paddlewheel you are making? ever seen those plastic birds stuck to a bowl on tom and jerry and they dip in and out havi a drink? i wonder if that can be run to break surface tension in a bigger way with a little pump filling up a beak of somesorts.
whatdya reckon, give that a go?

maurice, i suppose your source water has buffering ability already. could be that most waters have already.. i wonder about my tap water though when it comes out a 8.3. never got a full analyses of that stuff..
i wonder if the amount of water coming from the bore over the years has used up all the lime underground.

that way of tilling/drying sure is more thorough than i what ive paractised.
they do say the best is to dry for all winter but where i am, we are always looking to get another crop in.
when we want another pond we let it go a week in full sun then lime, (hydrated) for killing wet areas. i have seen trash fish handle the ag lime treatment but if you can get a full dry and till going your laughing.

it does interest me the different thoughts on what bugs and bacteria are there and then get killed..or may survive under the mud.. like how are they there to start with.. why wont they be back next time anyway.
it could be that my crops could be much better than they are.

best crop if ever heard of was when the pond was overfewrtilised and everything died.. it was then treated with potassium permangenate to kill bugs.. then it was bred in and it yeilded twice as much as normal.. but at that time no fertilisers had been used prior on that farm and the fist time it was used it was too harsh then after the treatment it would be assumed it wasa fairly sterile pond with the perfect amount of fertiliser for a crop to go great and survive.

thats the thing youd want to replicate, the right liming then the right egg number combined with air and the right fertiliser mix. a bit of luck with the weather.. then youd be farming steadily good numbers.

im pretty interested maurice in how you earate if any and how you ensure decent air in the ponds.. while you trap heat in..
there must be a hard to work out dynamic going on there surely.
ive read about computer controlled tomato houses down south using copper water pipes to warm the roots whgich run off old oil. and auto shitters that create the right humidity and co2 injection.. i wonder if that intensive approach would work for you to advantage. the owner reckoned without that extra heat he wouldnt make his bussiness profitable so something like that may help you.

[Maurice]

I run a big blower for air, with another to be added shortly. 3 open 1/2" pipes in each pond, I use to run large air stones, but they block too quickly.

The open 1/2" pipe moves a hugh amount of water and creates a large mushroom at the surface. The fry uses this current as their tread mill.

This photo is from back when I use to run airstones, the open pipe moves a lot more water.

[Maurice]

You are right about different dymamics of running mud ponds under cover. It's a whole new ball game I am still learning.
I've run outdoor mud ponds at the same location for half a dozen years, I'm having to learn all-over with them indoors, how best to manage the water.
It's not easy, but when right the gains are worthwhile.
Maurice.

[bekko]

Maurice, I've been curious as to why you did not line the bottom of the ponds and put clay back on top of the plastic. Doesn't the plastic on the sides sort of billow up if the water level is higher in adjacent ponds? You must have really tight clay that does not allow any water to move horizontally.

I guess everyone has problems with air stones clogging. I run the smallest regenerative blower possible to minimize electrical costs so the air flow drops off sharply if the diffuser starts to clog. I am always battling iron precipitate and iron bacteria. The higher the iron, the faster the stones clog. I started looking into your birm (sorry, not brim) filter but doubt I can afford the equipment or the energy to operate it.

I'm glad to hear you say you run the air line without a diffuser stone. I have been slowly getting rid of my stones too but won't switch over completely until doing some tests to see if it is really more efficient. Reportedly, the oxygenation in shallow ponds is enhanced more by creating surface disturbance to maximize oxygen transfer through the surface than by trying to create small bubbles and transfer oxygen from the bubble to the water.

Ranskye, the prototype paddlewheel was really great. I found a little 50 rpm gear motor for $35 US which only draws 13 watts! The shaft, paddles, bearing and float were all fabricated from PVC pipe or sheet. I had it loaded to the max, and it was moving the water around pretty well in a little 50 ton pond. There was no doubt that it was more energy efficient than the air stones. However, before I could do the definitive test, a branch fell out of a tree and lodged in the paddlewheel, stripping the gears. I was pissed, but will repair it and install a cage over the top to keep debris out of the paddles.

The next step is to start runnig oxygen transfer tests. There is a standard test protocol developed by the sewage treatment engineers. You use sodium sulfite catalized by cobalt chloride to remove all the oxygen from the water, turn on the aeration equipment, and plot the dissolved oxygen level as it increases. The results are boiled down to the weight (kg or lbs) of oxygen transferred to the water per kilowatt of electricity consumed by the aeration equipment. I finally have all the chemicals, O2 meter and test tank together, but won't have time to do the tests until June or July. Will let you guys know if anything useful comes out of it.

KFG, put an elbow and a short vertical nipple on the end of the horizontal pipes so no water can flow through until the level reaches the desired height.
-steve hopkins

[ranskye]

sorry to high jack your thread kfg, hope info coming from here helps you somwhere.

steve, thats pretty full on stuff, striping it all out chemically and turning the thing on and checking results. sounds like itd work well to prove just what works best per kw.
would love to hear your results.
ive seen some big electricity dinosaurs that wouldnt look like they work efficiently.

i heard from a guy that had a new chemical/organic liquid substance..plenty of knoweledge and information behind the claims, think it was hydrogen peroxide and some other bacterias.. it was pretty coslty for a pond though. lost contact with him before i tried it.
if that peroxide worked you could use an o2 sensor hooked to a peristaltic pump for dosing the pond. dunno though, it well may interfere with many other things. maybe just in times of zero o2. and the fish could just swim around the dispensor to keep em alive.

i know that you can get bottled o2 and o2 producing machines but i doubt theyd be efficient in ponds even with those o2 cones.
emergency stuff again i guess.

seems your little paddlewheel would be the go. surprising no one makes em yet. spose theres not that many small ponds around. if i had a backyard koi pond id be using one of those before a 2 horsepower water pump.
i was always of the mindset that small bubbles out of airliines were best till i saw they were using open enders in hatchery tanks on fry, id always thought it would smash em up but i guess you can always just turn it down. ive never kept a stone clean for long. maybe if they made a stainless one, ceramics still block, but id imagine stainless wouldnt let stuff take hold so well. no algae can grow on it anyway, i guess nothing much sticks.. then again youd have to filter intake too.

ive seen these earator units that wobble that make little rolling waves, they run on car wiper motors so thats pretty small wattage but they dont last very well befor ehtey overheat or break down in the joints, just waiting for the better equipment to fix it up. they sure work good though when theyre going., think theyre using them for sewerage treatment, theyve got a patent and all that but just not out yet cause they wont last yet. once all systems go ill let you know.

i remember seeing boyds findings on various earating methods..and per kilowatt the paddlewheel outperformed everything. only thing on big farms that use them they have a huge graveyard and a huge power bill,
I remember some guy came up with some other technique from a university but he was shot down for funding because the unit didnt stir as well like the paddlewheels would. no idea what it involved but i think it ran off solar power or heat. solar panels are pretty crap... maybe when we run outa oil..

also i remember reading in some science magazine that someone was researching a way of reproducing exactly what plants do, working with adinosene diphospates and triphosphates and all that jazz but it might be a long while waiting for that to eventuate and even then i think thered be a need for 24 hour light.

spose our trouble is that blooms or algae is the best way, its just that you get night/dark time and crashes.. ive seen that algae blooms can bring it up quicker than anything, id often wondered about running water through an alge tank indoors. maybe even a big lamp sitting above the water might prove to be the most efficient thing ever, sop long as you could keep a bloom.. thered be trouble running it through a tank with cultures algae and not having the algae all flow out with your flow or your screens block with algae.

then theres fibreoptic sending the light down deeper, if only that stuff was free.
some guy reckoned that a big plastic sealed tank heated up in the sun to expand air through a line would be free air but it wouldnt supply much and all the air would be hot and not much good at transfering the o2. still, i spose it could be used for something like cleaning out the base of swirl seperators if no power was around but yeah nearly useless i spose.

man if we just had nikolas tesla around and he wanted to grow fish everything would be just fine...

maurice, i once worked in a undercover system and i swear the humidity would build and i reckon the o2 may well become less in the atmoshere above the pond, already youve got no wind. so yeah id agree a way different ballgame.