If you live in an area where you get snow, you’ll probably be used to seeing it outside all the time during winter.
If you’ve had a pond for a while and you’ve had a waterfall running all throughout winter, you’ll have seen that, even though the pond might freeze over, the waterfall keeps flowing as if the season hadn’t changed.
This is because waterfalls don’t freeze easily, as they’re always in motion.
However, there’s a problem with this if you’re living in a place where the temperature drops to below freezing.
That’s why you need to turn off your pond waterfall when it starts to get cold.
You see, if the waterfall is flowing into the pond, and the temperature of the pond drops below freezing, the water in the pond will start to freeze as it comes into contact with the air.
That means that you’ll start to get ice forming on the pond, starting from where the waterfall flows in.
As the waterfall keeps flowing, that layer of ice will build up and up, until it’s covering the entire surface of the pond. That’s when you get an ice dam.
An ice dam is where the waterfall flowing into the pond gets backed up by the ice, so that there’s no longer any flow of water.
If you leave it like that, your pond’s water quality will quickly degrade, because there’s no flow of water to circulate and filter it.
However, that’s not the main problem with ice dams.
The main problem with ice dams is that, when you get a melt, all that water that’s been backed up by the ice will all come rushing out all at once.
That means that all that water will go tumbling down at once, down the path of least resistance. That usually means that it all ends up landing in one corner of the pond, which can cause erosion or damage to the pond liner.
That’s not to mention the fact that, if you’ve got fish in your pond, they’ll be trapped under the ice until the ice melts. They might even die if they run out of dissolved oxygen, since the water will have stopped circulating.
So you can see why you shouldn’t let ice dams form in your pond.
Preventing Ice Dams
There are a few different ways to prevent ice dams from forming in your pond.
The simplest way is to just turn off your pond waterfall when the temperature starts to drop. That way, the water in your pond will freeze over normally, without any ice dams forming.
However, if you want to keep your waterfall running in winter, or if you’ve just forgotten to turn it off before it gets too cold, there are other things you can do to prevent ice dams from forming.
One of those things is to set up your pond waterfall in such a way that the water doesn’t land on the pond itself. For example, you could have your waterfall flowing into a stream that connects to the pond lower down, so that the water never actually falls into the pond.
Another thing you can do is to make your waterfall so that it flows over a layer of rocks, rather than directly into the pond. This will break up the flow of water and help to prevent an ice dam from forming.
If you’ve got a really huge pond, you could even have a de-icer running in one corner of the pond, in order to prevent ice dams from forming. De-icers are basically just heaters that float on the surface of your pond, that stop the water directly around them from freezing.
They’re a bit of a last resort though, since they’ll cost you a bit to run all throughout winter, and they’re not the most natural solution. That being said, if you’ve got a really big pond, you might not have any other choice.
