Koiheat Sponsor of KoiLab

Koi heating has been on hobbyists minds for a decade. Many years ago, it was realized that the harsh overwinter fast and cold were critical contributors to the Springtime disease outbreaks we saw every year. Springtime ulcer Disease was often nothing more than a serious case of abuse by cold water, and no food during hibernation. And everyone was satisfied that this was normal, it happened in nature, it's okay. But it's not.

Koi are riverine fish. They [carp] originate at their early beginnings in rivers where nesting is impossible, and where egg scatterers thrive. Koi like cool clear water with higher than average aeration levels, and in rivers, it doesn't change temperatures much from summer to winter. Many rivers are supplied by springs and tributaries which are fairly uniform in temperature and mixing in rivers is so complete that temperature stratification is not the norm. Please note that pond and lake fish [such as Bass] tend to have evolved highly elaborate nesting and parenting behaviors. They lay and then guard their eggs.

But Koi [carp] are nothing if they aren't tough, and they handle pond life and water temperature extremes very well. But they wouldn't if they have a choice.

The purpose of this article is to show you a new heating system which in my opinion brings home sheer perfection. Once the only thing we had to heat ponds with were Spa heaters. They cost a pretty penny to run but they were compact and they could be called up in a short time. They didn't have digital controls, so it was a trial and error process to get the exact temperature you wanted. Then they came out with pool heaters, like the RayPac Versa. I had one of these. They work great and they are not terribly expensive. $2,000.oo would get one on the ground and probably installed most of the way. But they are made of proprietary parts. If the little solenoid fails, you have to get a specific replacement part from RayPac. What if the burner inside were to fail, do you have time to get that part in the dead of winter?

I built myself a multisegment system, that solved all those troubles. It was seven hundred dollars cheaper than the RayPac and was made with parts and components I could get at the Home Depot. (For a more detailed description, please see THIS)

The problem with it was that I could not get ANYONE to understand how to put this together at their house - the systems were tangled piles of copper, rubber, wire, and PVC and despite some pretty good schematics, they were not simple systems. To make matters worse, they depended on an ineffcient heat source. I used a 40 gallon water heater. So the gas furnace had to boil 40-70 gallons of water before it would transfer high amounts of heat across the exchanger.

To put it in a nutshell, my Mom couldn't build or install one of the systems I was recommending and building.

Now there's a heating system which does a few thing very differently. In the first place, my Mom could install this, and she doesn't care for pet fish. And she's in AARP. All one has to do is push water from a pump through 2 inch PVC to the bottom right port on the exchanger (red tube). Plug in the electrical pigtail. (It's 115V) and then run the water from the bottom left port of the exchanger to the pond again. Run a copper gas (Propane or Natural) line to the lug on the bottom of the boiler. Turn the unit on. Call John (the manufacturer) and he will step you through the settings and you're done.

The units are 3 foot wide and 3-4 foot tall. They stick out from the wall about ten inches total. They only have four 'action items' for their deployment. The only thing an elderly person really probably could NOT do is lift it into position on the wall. The unit weighs about 175 pounds.

Carl donated a KoiHeat unit to KoiLab for testing, as well as for the sake of the fish KoiLab wanted to study. Thank you Carl. We hooked up the unit in KoiLab. We connected one system of four tanks to another system of two tanks. We auto-levelled the systems with a unique overflow device and then they flowed through the heating system. Plumbing it was a snap. We hefted it onto two cross pieces of wood which we'd screwed into the upright members of the wall. We zipped some hex head screws into the back panel and this suspended the unit handily. We dropped a Maxair pump on the floor and plumbed it up to 2 inch and into the right port of the heat exchanger. We plumbed from the left port back to the pond.

We plugged the three prong cord into the wall outlet and then ran the LP gas line from the tank to the lug on the tiny little boiler. Within 2 hours the unit was running. Within one hour, it had given me two degrees on 3,200 gallons. By morning, with no more than 2 gallons of LP gas it would have all 3,200 gallons to 76 degrees F.

The KoiHeat unit ran 5 days on 8 gallons of gas [we weighed the supply tank], holding 3,200 gallons of water at 76o F while the other tanks in KoiLab were 62. Total cost to heat then maintain the 3,200 gallons at 76o F was $11.00 for Propane.