Trying something new in the bait tank

Hoping to find bait tank heaven, I bought a new tank so i don’t have to drag bait through the house. I did some searching and found some good info in koi pond forums. Found a product I hadn’t heard of that seemed like it would be easy to work with. Water is brown. Had a few leaves in there.

The boring part: I think my lava rock filter was plugging up with gunk and not providing enough bacteria. In the spring it worked great but later in the summer it would only keep a few fish alive and even then, they would slowly die. The blue & green stuff is matala mat. I think I have enough for a small koi pond.

Interesting idea but I do not think you have anywhere close to enough circulation to make that work. Water needs to flow pretty quickly THROUGH a bio filter for it to work. Not over it, not around it, but through it. Just having the material in the water does not work, probably why your lava rocks did not work. With that big of a media pad, in that big of a tank, I’d say you need around a 2000gph pump pulling water around to hold enough bacteria for a bait tank. It would look like a toilet bowl in there.

The tried and true best way to do it is still a bucket bio filter. Easy, cheap, simple, and works flawlessly.

That will work, but you might want to consider putting it in its own container, You want to be careful not to disturb the filter material if possible. I could see fish, cleaning or other activities interfering with the current set up.
Moving water is not a critical element. It just cant be isolated for any period of time.
Still looks to be a pretty sweet set up… and they are a blast to tinker with.
One last recommendation.. if you haven’t already done so. invest in a water testing kit so you can monitor your nitrification process. (ph, ammon, nitrite and nitrates.)

Larry, There is a place up in MN that sells filter foam for a fish tank version. link They just power them with a bubbler. The mat is pretty stiff. I’m tinkering a bit on this one. Didn’t want an ugly bucket sitting on top of it. A nitrite kit would be wise.

Thanks for a not crabby conversation.

I meant to mention a lot of koi ponds have a settling tank which would be a cool feature. They have the main tank overflow into a settling tank and then siphon off the top half of the tank to feed the pump. The poop settles to the bottom of the settling tank so they can crack a valve and drain the poop off in a minute or two.

Just because someone does it and posts it on the internet does not mean it is efficient or should be used. 20 years ago an aerator and and UGF (under gravel filter) were the staple for fish tanks. Now we know how inefficient they are in holding good bacteria and nobody in their right mind would use that set-up. Power UGF are sometimes used, but not very regularly. In either case, it is for an aquarium with very few fish and lots of water, and even then it is the most inefficient of all of the styles. You essentially built an UGF style that is attached to the side.

The koi ponds likely have way more filtration and water being pulled through there in order to make it work. Not to mention they are holding 800-2000 gallons of water for 10 fish, with lots of live plants to soak up nitrates. With your bait tank you are holding a lot of fish in a little water with no plants… which means higher ammonia and nitrites, and more filtration needed.

I’m not speaking out my [censored] here, I have built and maintained both ponds and bait tanks for a long time. I have seen and tried almost every method. The two best for your situation would be either a large pressure filter or a large external bio filter.

The way you have it now, it will not work once you fill it up with fish and the toxins start accumulating. But if you were to use it for a dozen or two minnows it might work okay.

kevin…you are correct about the systems not being self sustaining for an extended period of time… Keeping large volumes of bait in small confinements (under 300 gallons) in a warm water enviornment is very challenging. There is no way to have it be hands off completely. If you can minimize the ammonia levels on the front end by quarentining your bait till they purge the majority its less stressful and will minimize the level of toxins as they are converted through the process…. If you are not filtering your water through a large quantity of plants the only way to eliminate your Nitrates at the end of the process is to change out the water….
I’ve been able to sustain larger quantities of healthy bait for 60 plus days with water temps peaking at 93F through out the time period. Thou they did succumb to infection fairly quick (a little over 1.5 weeks) when I stopped feeding them.