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. 

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

The aerator above is running on a summer line. We have it marked with the
 red tie. The winter line is next to the aerator ready to be hooked up.

Buy winter airlines here

One airline runs to the diffuser at the bottom of the pond. Yours might be a plate or a set of blue air stones. This airline in the photo has the summer line hooked up.

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, you can do the same thing. You will need either 4 or 2 air stones depending on whether you have a PA2 or PA4. 

You can buy winter airlines for both the KA and the PA units here. 

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.

Questions? Let us know -- we are here to help,