Probably so.
If you have the drain I am thinking of, or similar. (one with a couple screws holding the perforated plate in) An easy thing to do with that is remove the plate. Make a solid disc about an inch or so larger in diameter than the outside diameter of the plate.
Use several washers under the new plate to stand it off a bit. You generally start with the perimiter area gap about the same as the area of the ID of the PVC pipe.
This will draw water off the bottom of the barrel/tank rather than just go down the drain.
You can close this gap up a bit and it will increase the surrounding velocity of the water being drawn in.
It won't get everything, but it sure will help a bunch.
You can apply this to circular tanks as well so that on every revolution, of the stuff on the bottom per revolution of the stuff on bottom, it gets sucked out. Did I say that correct???
A note on bag filters and mechanical (micron rated) filters in general. 100 microns is going to be 100 microns, no matter who measures it. Difference is what you are trying to filter and the how the filter media is manufactured.
To make this really short. I assume you all have screens on your windows, or at least some. Good!!! In a fish situation, you would want to have a pattern similar to that and only one layer. If you used a spun bonded, felt, fuzzy multi layered media, then sure, it will clog pretty quick. Fish poo should be classified as a state of matter, all on it's own
Rotary Drum filters are what the big boy's use, and are self cleaning, but are quite EEKspensive!!! If you selected the proper bag filter, and yes, gravity, it is not much different than that. Big exception tho, "YOU" are the self cleaning mechanism.
Funny thing tho. It's much more work to clean the clarifier in the book. I am sure they did not have the filter media types we have today. That has to be well over 35+ years ago. Good book tho.
It's not like any one of us are trying to cram 2.5lb of fish per gallon and feeding 3% body weight per day!
