Keep Bait Alive ALL Winter Long! (How to Minnow Tank Build DIY)

Welcome back to another video guys, as you can see today I'm in the garage and behind me I have a bunch of

minnow

tank

s set up and I want to share with you how I

keep

bait

in the garage all the time. all

winter

while I was losing very few fish so to start I'm going to show you the

tank

s that I have here for 110 gallon tanks set up so what's in these tanks is this the small tank and these are golden shiners they're their size. Little ones as you can see, they are quite brave. I don't have the filter set up on this tank yet because I wanted to show you exactly how I'm setting up these tanks, but on this tank right here we have everything set up. up and these are our medium ones and in the next tank we have big giant golden shiners down in this white basket.

I'll explain what it is here in a minute, but these are the giant golden shiners and obviously the bass and pike guys. I love those as well as the large shiners that also hide under the filter on this tank and last but not least on the large tanks is the tank with suction cups so these are not big suction cups by any means , but these are the big suckers that I have, as you can see, there are a lot of them in there and I also have these smaller white suckers here, which is the setup I have right now, oh yeah, and in this tank are actually the Tommy Cod ones , some people call them mummy chugs or killifish they are from the same family and the old timers call them Tommy Cod's so that's what we'll call them, the reason the tanks are so dirty is because I just introduced them and like I do with all the fish I have. to purge them before you can dump them into a main tank, so the first question I usually get is what do you start storing them in and this is what I decided to store mine in this year.

These are 110 gallon reserve tanks used for water, cows, livestock and such, you can get them at a tractor supply company for about $80 each. The brand I use is called heavy duty material, but you can use whatever works for you, you can use something simple like Rubbermaid. bag like this one here or you can go all the way up to a big one hundred and ten gallon tank or even bigger if you want so it all depends on how much

bait

you plan on storing if you're going to

keep

thousands and thousands of live shiners in a tank really you need to pick something that makes sense to you and me, these are these one hundred and ten gallon tanks, if you're only going to keep a couple hundred

alive

you can go simple an eight dollar Rubbermaid bag like that or also a simple cooler So once you've chosen your storage tank the next thing to worry about is water, so what I'm using here is just well water and it doesn't really contain any chemicals. or at least anything that could harm these fish, so I literally just pour the water into the tanks, fill them and then dump the fish in right after, you pretty much don't have to wait if you're using well water.

You're using city water and it has chlorine and stuff, it changes the look a little bit and you have to wait, I think it's about 24 hours to throw it away, but that's up to you, you just don't want to kill a bunch. of bait, especially if you are paying a lot for it. Well, now that we have discovered water, the next thing we need to talk about is aeration and there are many ways to aerate water. They sell many different bubblers. but I want to go over what bubblers I have here and which ones seem to work best for me.

There are some that I like and others that I don't like. Okay guys, now let's talk about aeration. I have some. of the aerators here just to discuss which one is my favorite and which ones will work well so we'll start by looking at this little yellow one, this is the one that comes like the one from mr. bubbles a small bait bucket aerator and it works well, there are a lot of bubbles and there are small bubbles, but for this style of setup you definitely want something that has a little more power and a little more space, so this is the next and this is just a cheap one from Walmart that you can get in the fish aisle at Walmart and it actually works pretty well.

I'm not going to say it's bad, but we can also do better than this and my opinion and In my opinion, this is the best aerator, so one of the things with aeration is that you want a whole ton of bubbles and you want them. Bubbles are as small as possible to obtain the largest possible aeration surface in the water. At least that's what I understand. I'm not an aquarium hobbyist but that's what I found works for me and I think it's true so this is the best one I found because it's all used space, it doesn't have a plastic bar like the other one and when you I don't have enough tube right now, but it almost always falls perfectly horizontal, which evenly distributes the bubbles throughout the water and the other thing is that there are little bubbles. and there are a ton of them so for the price in my opinion this is the best aerator especially if you are trying to make big tanks with a lot of fish they need a lot of aeration so go for this one you can get. it's from Petsmart I wouldn't recommend this aerator right here, it's like ten dollars at Petsmart, it's the same material as the one I like the most, but every time you throw it it never lands like it's supposed to and ends up destroying one. or two big bubbles most of the time and it really does a bad job, especially for the money and on the topic of aeration guys, it really doesn't matter exactly what type of aerator you use, use what you want to use and what works. for you, but there is definitely a point where you can have very little aeration, the shiners will start to become sluggish and then they will rise to the surface and act like a circular pattern where they are sucking air over their gills from the surface of the water because the oxygen in the water is very depleted, okay guys, this is what I mean by they start to rise to the surface and they got scared because I'm here, but they start to rise to the surface and slurp from the top of the water. the water because I took out the aerators to move them to the big tanks and as you can see they are slowly starting to rise and they will start doing it in a circular pattern and sipping from the surface of the water and last but not least.

They're the filters, those are those buckets with the tube that goes in right there, as you can see. I currently have it set to two, two by four, just to keep it out of the water a little bit. I was thinking about maybe running through them. too, but the filter is very important if you are going to hold a lot of bait because they will cloud the water very quickly and you don't want to have to do a hundred and ten gallon water changes every time you know. or twice a week if not necessary and these filters do a great job of clearing the cloudiness of the water, as you can see there is a little bit of stuff down there but that's only because I didn't install the filter. immediately, but the water is, as you can see, crystal clear and they've been there for about a week, so to show you what the filter settings are, I have this set up here, so I start at the bottom with a tetra pond pump from three hundred and twenty five gallons per hour and then from there it's just a half inch Tygon tube to the top of this bucket where I put a hole in it and then on the underside of this is just another hose clamp with the tube to keep it from falling out. of the lid here, so I often get asked what's inside the bucket filter and I actually came up with this idea originally from the Maine Trout Whisperer and I know a lot of other people do, but he was the one from I first came up with the idea so I'll leave a link to his channel in the description below, but what's inside here is just an air filter for an HVAC system for a house, these things cost like six dollars for like a three foot by two foot sheet at Lowe's so I cut it into a circle that fits the size of the bucket and then in this case I put two of them in there and then I put some scouring pads underneath and it acts as a biofilter , but that's not one hundred percent my goal because the water temperature is so cold that I don't even think bacteria would really have a chance to grow inside these, but I thought I'd leave them in here anyway, even if I don't think that the beneficial bacteria are going to grow because I don't know, maybe it helps at least filter some of the water, if not create some of those good bacteria that will eat the fish waste and clean that water for us, so, in Long story short, that's what the bucket filter is, it's just a bunch of scrubbers with some air filters on top and it does a pretty good job of keeping the water clean if you want to look.

For more information you can search for biofilters on YouTube, they are used in ponds and essentially all they do is grow good bacteria in the substrate or the medium, which is this material, and then it filters the water keeping it clean and keeping the water clean. , so one thing to remember with the pump is yes, this is a 325 gallon per hour pump, however, as you increase the height at which you are trying to pump the water to this hose here it is 5 feet, actually decreases the amount of water. it comes through the pump only because it has to work harder against gravity and everything, so you're not really going to get a 325 gallon per hour pump if you fill it half full and restrict the flow by pushing it up against gravity, but This is what it works for.

For me, if you wanted to go bigger or smaller, you could buy whatever size pump works best for your circumstances, but I found this one works well for this tank. Now that we know how these filters work and we also know aeration. Another thing I wanted to talk about is this thing right here, it's what makes the water blue. A lot of guys always ask how you get blue water at the bait shop or whoever Sonya is and this is how they do it. it's called finer glitter it's also called finer bait and all it is is like a fine salt powder blue substance and as you can see I don't have it in the tanks right now because the water is crystal clear but this is which protects the coating. of the fish, if you're going to store the bait for

long

periods of time I highly recommend picking up some of this stuff, it's pretty expensive but I think it's a gallon jug and it's lasted me three years and it's probably not even half empty.

Another thing that the fine sheen does for you is that it protects you against disease and if you store meat for a very

long

period of time, what can happen is that on the gills they can start to grow almost like a white fungus and you really don't want to. that because once one gets it, everyone will get it and it infects each other or something, but you definitely don't want that and a finer glitter is a great way to prevent it, so definitely that finer glitter. It makes a big difference, but none of this works unless you keep the water super cold.

I have found that between 32 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit is the perfect temperature to hold bait for long periods of time. I have kept it up to two months without any illness or problem. without feeding them because their metabolism slows down so much that it seems like they just don't need the food and they don't care anyway and it works perfect if you keep the tanks cold you will be able to keep the bait for a very long period of time. In fact, I'm on the verge of having ice in these tanks right now. I had some this morning that I had to clean up and that's perfect, that's exactly what you want if you're not temperature controlled.

Ambient ice and tanks is not a bad thing, but on the subject of ice and tanks, one way to deal with it is to have tank de-icers in stock. They are literally made exactly for these tanks. It is a submersible heater that is placed. there and just keeps it from freezing on those really cold nights. One thing you have to be very careful about when you are heating tanks is that you do not cook your shiners; You can literally leave in the morning. and all your bait will be dead and that's a big problem obviously you don't really want to do that so make sure you read the instructions on the original tank heaters you will be using for an easier way to control the ice levels in the tank is that if it gets too cold, you can always just pour a five gallon bucket of hot water into the tank, but make sure you understand how the fish will react and how much you are diluting the water because Sudden changes of hot and cold or hot and cold They can really hurt these fish and you will see them belly up and they just won't come back for a minute so make sure you understand how much you are diluting the water if you are going to pour hot water into a cold tank so this is a great way to store a Ton of bait for you all

winter

long.

It really helps you not have to stop at the bait shop every morning, you can just buy a couple dozen extra when you go to keep them on hand and you can be on the ice before dawn and before any of the shops open of baits. Plus, we just surpassed a thousand subscribers, which means a lot to me. I work very hard to discover them. Videos and how to make them for you andit means a lot to me. I really appreciate it, so I hope you have a great day and good luck setting up your tank.

I hope to see you next time.