Matt-Congratulations on your new project. I have a 1 1/2 year old pond that is entirely for rainbow and steelhead trout. I will briefly tell your what i did and what didn't work. My pond is an earthen pond approx 1/2 acre. I live in Western Nebr and we have hot summers and mild but sometimes very cold winters. My pond is 7ft deep at the deepest and varies from there. I have a 3 to 1 slope and have very little problems with weeds in the pond. I have a clay bottom but decided to line it with a plastic liner with a foot of dirt on it as well just as a precaution. I fill it with a 40 gal/minute well with an overflow on the low end. I have to run my pump 24/7 during the hottest part of the summer. Usually July-Sept 15th to keep the water temp cool enough not to stress the trout. I put in ?? number of fathead minniows in May of the first year and stocked the trout in late June. The minnows reproduced like crazy and i also have snails and crayfish. The fish that i catch typically have as many snails in their belly as minnows. The first problem that i ran into was i put in a bottom diffuser and during August the first year had a massive die off due to lack of O2 and mixing the water colume and deleting the cooler summer refuge water due to the mixing. I immediately purchased a top water kasco splasher and this summer which was miserably hot i never lost a trout. One thing you have to have is a water supply either natural or spring fed. If you use a well it is best to set up a packed colume and aerate the well water as well. I am working on doing this as the well water have very little O2. I imagine that in Arizona in the summer you will have even a bigger challenge keeping fish alive unless your are committed to all the things listed above. Test you soil and then test your water. During the heat of the year this summer i had a terrible suspended Algae problem. I was hesitent to treat with Curtrin but did in late September and it totally got it back to 2 ft visability. My coming 2 yr old steelheads are 5-6 pounds and the rainbows are arround 3-4 lbs. The biggest success that i have had was putting spawning pallets on the shallow edges for the fatheads to spawn and in fact i had to trap several thousand minnows to get the population down so i could have more fishing success. That is the short answer but hopefully it will help you not make some of the decisions that i did when it came to aeration. One thing that i should mention is my consultant C.B. aerates his well water and gets along just fine with just a bottom diffuser. The top water splasher just produces so much more DO. Hope that helps somewhat. Get a book and read it before you do anything else.

jeff