Otterbine’s recommendation for healthy water in the heat

There will be enough to do this summer with El Niño on its way, so don’t let water quality be another problem to deal with, especially when prevention is so much easier than cure, says Accredited Supplier, Reesink Turfcare who supplies Otterbine, a leading water management specialist.

Thanks to the warming effects of the climate phenomenon El Niño, when temperatures in the Pacific Ocean rise or fall beyond the norm and influence weather patterns across the globe, the UK can expect the summer of 2023 to exceed that of 2022 and turn out to be the fifth or sixth hottest on record. And with the sun comes dangers for lakes and ponds. Left unattended, water can quickly deteriorate creating problems such as algae, aquatic weeds and odours, and while the repercussions are laborious and costly to fix, preventing them isn’t.

It all comes down to aeration, as Simon Powell, Otterbine business development manager at Reesink Hydro-Scapes explains:

“Higher levels of sunlight and heat, generated by the summer sun, can lead to excess nutrients in water bodies. When combined with low oxygen levels and limited circulation, the natural ecosystem tips out of balance, causing algae, weeds, odours and sludge to build up, which can even kill off aquatic life. Once a water body reaches this point the costs of trying to restore it increase dramatically. As well as often being more expensive to implement, reactive solutions tend to be less friendly to the environment too.”
 

The easy, sustainable solution is to add air with a surface and subsurface aerating system and Otterbine has some of the best in the business, confirms Simon:

“Otterbine’s range of products has some of the highest oxygen transfer and pumping rates in the industry, adding as much as 3.3lbs or 1.5kg of oxygen per horsepower hour into the water and pumping over 920GPM or 199m3/hr per horsepower.”