Pontoon Boat & Deck Boat Forum

My boating & dock experience is limited to the small lake my cottage is on--so excuse me if this seems like a stupid question
My cottage is on an inland lake in MI on the 45th parallel. It freezes thick enough to drive on. Not one of the owners around my lake leave a dock in during winter. What would happen if I did?

I'd hate to think I may be doing all this remove/replace work for nothing & all my neighbors are ignorant

Your dock will be destroyed. Shifting ice is powerful stuff.

Move south when you can. Our Tennessee River docks are built on 4" round steel pounded 4' into the ground until it hits bedrock. Few piers are even made of wood--they're all steel and concrete.

My neighbor built a 30' concrete top pontoon boathouse and a 30' concrete deck down low 5 years ago--$58K. A double boathouse is pushing $100K.

And that's after the 5' concrete sea walls are installed. Virtually all land within sight of my house has seawalls, and the waves slosh like a bathtub on a busy Summer Sunday afternoon.

Life on Golden Pond can get a little expensive. But when things calm down, it's really nice.

You will have to take it out every year or you will have no dock left. I figure it is just part of my spring and fall ritual when I do my dock! I live in the U.P. of MI

I asked because I had a couple comments from others on different MI lakes who say they never take theirs out. I wanted to make sure I wasn't "going with the flow" of my neighbors for no good reason.

Just take out the part of the dock you want to keep.

Here at Lake of the Ozarks in central Missouri we used to see the lake freeze almost all the way across where we live (1 mile+). Lately though, it's mostly just near the shore, but it can still get thick enough around the dock to cause some issues when the ice goes out.
I use a 1/2 horsepower dock deicer from Kasco (http://www.kasco-marine.com). It's got a thermostat and timer on the controller. The thermostat isn't that accurate. I set mine on about 25 degrees and just pull out all the little pegs so the deicer is running any time it sees the temp I set it to and it keeps the ice away from the entire dock which is approximately 34' deep X 45' wide including the two wells.
We do not get ice like you do in Michigan, but Kasco shows a video of some cold place that is kept ice free for a pretty wide circumference.
Unit is not cheap, about $400 with the controller, and then there's the juice to run it. From my standpoint, which is a dock way to big to take out of the water, beside which it's on flotation devices, this is a much cheaper way.