Just wanted to give an update...All the brookies lived (even after being in only 4 inches of water for 12hours....left the gate open by accident and didn't realize it! I was luckly I had my drain setup the way I did or they would have had no water!) After being in the tank since the last week of July I was going away for a week last week so I decieded to put them all back down in the cage in the pond seeing the pond temps are down in the low 40's to high 30's. The setup worked great, I had next to no floating solids and non on the bottom of the tank (even with the pallet fork ridges this tank had). After running the re-circulation system for a week or two I decieded I was getting enough swirl in the tank and dropped the well water input back to just 3/4 gallons per minute. Amonia levels were perfect and there was no signs on stress even with heavy feeding. My solid's waste trap worked great and I could go a few days before pulling the gate valve and and would have a huge rush of solids where the drain exited my building.
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The best part of my whole system was the growth of the Brookies...when I put them in the tank they were aprox 18" long on average and were aprox 1.5lbs (they were starved in the pond from late May till July to keep thier activity levels down). When I pulled them out last week the average brookie had grown 2.5" and of the 5 fish I weighed they had grown to 3.5-4.5lbs and there was one even larger that I didn't get a chance to weigh. I was ammazed at the growth in 2.5 months. The strange part was that I also had a few rainbows in the tank and their grown was even more pronounced but I had one Brown in the tank and it didn't put on length or weight and was one of the more active fish in the tank I thought!

All in all, it was a great experiment and I will be putting them all back into the system next summer and a few other younger ones I got this fall from my supplier.

Ryan