What LakeMat Does and Doesn’t Do

Our products offer the best solution available for controlling lake weeds and lake bottom muck. However, there are some things we don’t, won’t, and can’t do.

We can’t treat whole lakes

Our lake weed control mats, LakeMat Pro and MuckMat Pro are designed for individual lakefronts and beaches. They create weed-free areas for people to swim, wade and bring their boats in and out.

Sometimes whole lakes and ponds become infested with invasive weeds and must be treated with aquatic weed control chemicals or lake drawdowns. Weed control for whole lakes is complex.

Correcting problems that lead to weed-choked lakes take a long time. For treating whole lakes, aquatic herbicides or lake drawdowns are the only somewhat effective short term options I know of.

We guarantee we can fix your lake front — just not your whole lake.

We don’t remove muck — because it doesn’t work — but we do have a much better solution

If you’ve shoveled a driveway during a snow storm, you know if the wind blows your driveway will drift back in again. Snow gets trapped and settles in the lowest spot, out of the wind — your driveway.

Lake muck works the same, but worse. With snow, the wind doesn’t blow constantly — with muck, there is always water pushing it around.

When I was young, a man bought land on our lake and dug a long canal, six-feet deep, intending to sell lots off it. He ran out of money, or enthusiasm and abandoned the project.

Within a few years, the water in it was two-feet deep, now it’s about one-foot deep… the bottom is all filled in with muck. Muck removal is a losing battle.

Muck removal from a lake is usually a losing battle. My dad and neighbor used a big backhoe, dug as far out as the could. No good, it all filled back in. It’s just the way lakes work — they’re constantly filling in.

What we do is put a MuckMat Pro  on top of your muck. Think of it as a giant snowshoe — because it actually works exactly like a snowshoe. You can see how well a MuckMat Pro works in this video.

We won’t claim to magically make muck disappear

Okay, this is just… silly. I’ve written at length about this elsewhere, and I can’t believe I’m writing about this again, but…

Here’s the short version —  muck is mostly dirt, right?  Well… nothing eats dirt.

Muck-eating bacteria, eat organic stuff, like dead leaves, weeds and fish poop. They don’t eat soil, because it’s just dirt — not edible.

Besides, you already have trillions of bacteria in your lake right now.

Let’s do the math — 10 percent of your lake bottom muck is organic. In 50 inches of muck, you may have 5 inches that’s edible.

Say the bacteria eat all 5 inches — you have 45 inches of muck left — AND THAT STILL A LOT OF MUCK!

“Hey, this is great, now I only sink in up to my knee, I used to sink over my knee!”

What if you have a lot more organic stuff, like 50 percent of the muck is organic?

Then what you have is not a place on a lake. What you have is pretty big problem. I’ve seen a few of these. Bacteria won’t help.

We can’t do much for floating algae — but…

I admit I’m a weird about this — but I find algae absolutely fascinating… I’ll spare you the details here. All our lake weed control mats control underwater algae like starry stonewort and chara.

But algae that floats, is a problem — because —  it floats. And it floats wherever the wind blows it. It likes to stick to lake weeds, so if you have our Mats, it will help a little, the algae will float right on by and stick to something else.

There is an easy, inexpensive answer. If you’re responsible and don’t overdo it, it should have little effect on anything except algae.

It’s called copper sulfate, (copper salt, or copper combined with sulfur). Copper sulfate is not an herbicide, it’s copper and sulfur, pretty common stuff.

Algae hates it and dies in the presence of copper sulfate, (no, you can’t just throw pennies or old copper pipes in the lake).

If you go crazy with it, you’ll kill off algae, bacteria, fungi, plants and snails, cause “oxygen depletion,” and kill your fish, too. Some species of fish, like trout, are sensitive to copper sulfate.

Follow the directions, keep the kids and pets away — and you should be fine. You’ll probably have to reapply it from time to time, but it will kill your algae.

Finally, we don’t completely rebuild beaches

There are companies that will come in, remove truckloads of muck, put liners and soil barriers down and blow truckloads of beach sand on top of the liners and barriers, maybe add a seawall… and get all the necessary permits to do all these things.

Sometimes, these companies use our SandMats as part of the process. They make very nice, fully restored beaches, but like I said… we don’t do that.  But for a fraction of the cost, we’ll fix your beach and you can put your own sand on our Mats.

However, if you have the kind of dough to afford a complete beach restoration, please, give me a call… I know of a great company you’ll probably want to invest in…