Now that your pond is ready to go, it’s time to look at maintenance. Keeping your pond in peak condition, year-round with preventative measures ensures that your water feature will remain invaluable for years to come.
Maintaining Water Volume for Fire Suppression Ponds
Before tackling maintenance steps, you will first want to make note of your pond’s overall capacity. For instance, a typical 2,000 square foot home generally requires about 8,000 gallons of water to fully extinguish fires. At the same time, a barn fire generally requires upwards of 25,000 gallons.
One cubic foot of water contains roughly 7.8 gallons of water. This unit of measurement becomes valuable during the planning phase of installation, as it will allow installers to predict the total amount of water available.
When planning the installation of a fire suppression pond, it is important to consider the water levels during the lowest level of the season as well as the water level when your pond freezes over in the winter. It’s also necessary to consider water loss from evaporation, so it’s best to have more water than you think you might need.
Maintenance for Multi-Use Ponds
Despite the specific intention behind building a fire suppression pond, there is no need to have a singular use for them. In some cases, irrigation ponds can even function as reserve water sources during droughts. This is another reason it can be critical to have more water on hand that you predict you will need.
Dry Hydrant Maintenance
Dry hydrants function very well in all seasons in multipurpose ponds. Most people who utilize their water for both irrigation ponds and fire suppression ponds have little trouble with the once-yearly maintenance and seasonal visual inspection of their dry hydrants.
Maintenance is generally very simple. Once a season the dry hydrant should be checked for debris and excess weeds or silt. Once a year, the hydrant itself should be tested to make sure it is in working order in case the pond is needed to fight fires.
If the pond’s sole purpose is fire suppression, the water can be inoculated with herbicides or colorants to keep both algae and underwater plants at bay.
If this is how the pond will be managed, then pond maintenance can occur less frequently because the chances of an obstruction to your water source are decreased.
