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pond depth services #12306912 06/22/17 08:58 PM
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jazz Offline OP
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I am looking for someone to come out and survey a pond for me to depth and calculate volume. I have 2 in the Madisonville area and going out in a boat with a stick/depth finder is not practical or accurate enough. Is anyone aware of a company that can do that. Thanks in advance.

Re: pond depth services [Re: jazz] #12307017 06/22/17 09:51 PM
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Overton Fisheries in Buffalo


"Things turn out best for those who make the best of the way things turn out" - Zachary Troy Schrah - a young man with vision far beyond his years.
Re: pond depth services [Re: jazz] #12307880 06/23/17 01:55 PM
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Thanks . tried them yesterday but they said they don't do that kind of work. Biggest question she had was why do you want to know how much water you have?

Re: pond depth services [Re: jazz] #12308118 06/23/17 04:21 PM
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Originally Posted By: jazz
... Biggest question she had was why do you want to know how much water you have?


LOL. That's funny because knowing how much water you have is critical to most all pond management decisions.

You can pretty easily and accurately DIY with a couple of tools: 1) portable depth finders that you cast with a fishing rod. You can easily throw them long distances and cover a lot of water. The second tool would be one of those roller measuring devises...just roll it along the shoreline, record the feet, and then compute the "area under the curve" . Coupled with the depth finder you can get total surface acreage, water volume, and acre ft pretty accurately...and still have the two tools for other uses.

Re: pond depth services [Re: jazz] #12308644 06/23/17 09:41 PM
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Meadowlark - I have seen some of your other posts and appreciate your input. On calculating volume how tight of a grid would recommend for depth recordings. I know the tighter the more accurate and we are looking for +/- 15%. We are doing this for someone else and I have a general idea of what the bottom looked like during 2011 and it did still had some water in it.

Re: pond depth services [Re: jazz] #12308749 06/23/17 10:35 PM
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Oh well....me I just let the customer decide if what they need is cost effective or not. I just had a job where it was extremely important to know as close as possible how much water volume I had to deal with. The lake was a complicated one with a weird shape and long arms extending off it. Not a job I was capable of doing my own self to the degree of accuracy I required. So:

The folks I was working for hired Paul Dorsett out of College Station. He's with an outfit called "Solitude Lake Management," nowadays. All I can say is they did a very good job and I got the important information I needed. In some ways this group would be considered some of my competition. All I can testify to is that they did a good job. I got no idea what it cost.


Fishbreeder


Re: pond depth services [Re: jazz] #12308815 06/23/17 11:32 PM
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Originally Posted By: jazz
Meadowlark - I have seen some of your other posts and appreciate your input. On calculating volume how tight of a grid would recommend for depth recordings. I know the tighter the more accurate and we are looking for +/- 15%. We are doing this for someone else and I have a general idea of what the bottom looked like during 2011 and it did still had some water in it.


I'm still laughing that someone in the pond business actually questioned why you needed that data...LOL.

If the bottom is a typical bowl shaped like a lot of ponds, accuracy will be generally high with relatively few data points and of course likewise, if it is irregular bottom with channels and cuts and underwater islands, many more data points will be required.

You can certainly get well within the +- 15% on area by using appropriate geometric shapes(circles, squares, trapezoids, rectangles) and the roller I mentioned. A hand held GPS will nail that down very accurately, much more than 15% and will even calculate the area for you.

The depth is where it gets more tricky...especially from the bank. One rule of thumb for most regular shaped ponds is to calculate average depth by multiplying the max depth by .4. This would be good for regular shaped bottoms....but for irregular and/or precise calculations, the more data points you get, obviously, the more accurate the volume calculation.

You can do some "sensitivity" analysis to get a feel for how much error in your depth measurements affects the volume calculation. Let’s say, for example, you had a 3 surface acre pond and 6 ft average depth that would equate to a volume of about 5.9 million gallons. Now, if you missed the average depth by 15%, that would equate to about .9 million gallons less or more, for example.

Wish I was nearby as that would be fun to do that calculation.

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