New Pond Help/Aeration

[whittwhitt]

Howdy guys! So we had a pond dug last fall and this spring it has filled up with snow melt - we're in Northern Minnesota. It's about 30'x60', mainly 4-5ft deep, with a gradual decline to 7-8ft. Our soil is clay, no plants or anything yet.

We added some bait store minnows from our local gas station this weekend just to see how'd they do - we know now you don't want those in your pond because of disease/general health issues - some survived/some died.

Our aerator arrived yesterday and we put it in the water, let it run for about 3 hours and then noticed some minnows had died - we didn't know you're supposed to run it in increments every day until you're up to 24 hrs/day, so it's off now. We only ran it for maybe 25 mins this morning, but we still had some minnows die.

Wondering where we're going wrong with aeration? We're specifically using this aerator - HiBlow HP-80 from Amazon. Should we not aerate/keep aerating? Any idea what's killing them exactly? Our end goal would be to have a few fish in it but we obviously want to have everything figured out before adding anything else.

 

[Mmathis]

Hello and welcome!

Sorry, but I’ve not heard that about aerators. I thought you ran them 24/7.

 

[GBBUDD]

Before you look at aeration as a problem have you tested the water? i assume theres no filter and your pond receives runoff from the ground. Not ideal depending on what is in the area like farming a busy road parking lot neighborhood with gardens theres a million possibilities

 

[whittwhitt]

Before you look at aeration as a problem have you tested the water? i assume theres no filter and your pond receives runoff from the ground. Not ideal depending on what is in the area like farming a busy road parking lot neighborhood with gardens theres a million possibilities

Just rain and snow runoff - we're in the country but no large farming operations or anything like that to worry about, no neighbors.

But no filters and haven't tested the water.