[/quote]
Ryan,
What was the diameter of your tank, how many trout to you have in there and what size again? [/quote]
its an 8' dia with 24" of water and is aprox 700gallons give or take a few. I am actually thinking of dropping the water down 2" so I can have the water inlet above the water shooting out the 1" PVC. I have done alot of experimenting and my best full swirl is happening when I drop the water down just below the inlet. I just added the pressure tank to the setup the other day and its great on the hydro bill (pump runs for 1 minute 15 seconds and then shuts off for almost 3 minutes) and I have the same gpm heading up to the degasser as I did before. I just might add another and even larger presure tank so I can get even more circulation!
I have aprox 25 brookies, 2 rainbows and 2 browns in the tank currently at legths from 18-21" and in the 3 weeks they have really started to put on the weight and inches. I am still constantly running well water also and have 1.5 gallons flowing thru and everything is seeming to do great.
Also, the little trick my pond guy told me about with the lower drain just before the gate valve and the 1/4" hose pulling the solids towards the valve is working great. I have a gallon pail out in the bush where the water exits the system and if I dump it out and go back in and give the gate valve a quick up and down and go back out and check the pail there is nothing but solids, food scraps and waste in the pail. Here is one picture I took which was from one quick opening of the valve...I am sure there would have been even more if I would have held it open for a little longer.
Last week I was at the largest of our Ministry of Natural Resorces fish hatcheries in northern Ontario (they are the hatchery that saved the Aurora Trout from extiction...if your not familiar with them they are a verson of the Brooke Trout without the speckles
http://www.auroratrout.com/ ) Anyway, they are the largest provincially own trout hatchery and specialize in Brookies or Speckled trout as we call them up here. I showed the manager my pictures of my setup and was amazed at the setup as even my degasser unit was a scaled down version of what they have (they have 250 pails of 1.5" bio barrels pumping 5000gpm thru them!!!). He said that inflow will be the most important but I should have no issues with 50lbs of fish per gallon and said I should be able to put at least 150-200lbs of speckles in the tank pumping in 4gpm of well water and recirculating another 4gpm thru the degasser if I wanted to do so.
