What's A "Winter Airline"?

Hopefully by now you understand the merits of oxygenating your pond (the right way!). And you have an aerator set up in  your pond. But here comes winter! What do you do with your aerator? And what the heck is a "winter airline"?

In the summer, aerators add extra oxygen to the water for the health of your fish and to help keep your water crystal clear. In the winter, we don't really need either of those things! Cold water holds plenty of oxygen for fish. And the water is too cold for single-celled algae to thrive.

However, we need to keep those aerators running in the winter so that they can keep a hole open in the ice. We just need to make a few adjustments...

The key to keeping your fish safe in winter is to keep a hole open in the ice for gasses to exchange -- so your fish can breathe -- and to keep the warmer water in the bottom of your pond undisturbed. 

At Cool Ponds, we run two sets of airlines from our aerators, which we switch back and forth from summer to winter.

Here you can see our connected "summer" line and the "winter" line ready to go whenever it gets cold.

One airline runs to the diffuser at the bottom of the pond. Yours might be a plate or a set of blue airstones. This airline is run in the summer.

The other airline runs to a diffuser in front of our skimmer, just a few inches beneath the water surface. This will disturb the water in front of the skimmer, preventing ice from forming. This is especially important if you're running your pond during the winter. 

Here's a winter airline setup.

Running two airlines makes it easy to switch back and forth between summer and winter. 

You just unplug the airlines you're not using and plug in the other -- leaving all the diffusers in place. If you don't have a separate winter airline set, then you'll need to drag your diffuser from the bottom of the pond and set it to just beneath the water surface. This can be a real pain, especially when the water is cold!

If you have a PA aeration system like the one pictured below, we sell separate airline kits. If you have a KA system like the one pictured above, stop by the shop and we'll cut your winter airline custom to what length you need and set you up with a second diffuser.

This is a PA aeration system and uses the blue stone diffusers.

Watch our video below on how we set up a winter airline in our Celebration pond.