livewell question

[lugnut]

i've got a littel alluminum hull bass boat and the livewell in it has a pump to bring water in. to keep bass alive, should i add an arreator or another pump so that i can pump water out of the livewell and add new water in (recirculating pump)?

right now, to get water out, it's a gravity system so the boat has to be out of the water and you pull the plug and water runs out.

any ideas how to make update it to make it a better livewell?

[DBrooke]

Mine has a overflow in it, when the water gets so high it just runs out the drain so if I need to keep good water in I can just keep it on and it'll keep pumping in fresh water. If I need to pull the boat out of the lake I just shut the pump off again. Also has a drain plug in the bottom.

[lugnut]

when i bought the boat it had a piece of PVC pipe stuck up out of the drain in the bottom of the livewell. i can only assume that it was a homemade attempt to drain the water at a certain level but  i couldn't ever get it to work. it may have been operator error but i just didn't seem to work at all.

does that sound pretty similar to the setup in your livewell?

[DBrooke]

Yeah similar. Mine is a piece of aluminum pipe with a T in it. the lower of the T has the drainplug, the other part of it comes up to just under "full" which is where the water overflows.

[lugnut]

my dad's supposed to bring my boat out here to tx in the next few weeks. (i didn't have room to bring it when i first moved) i'll have to try it out again, maybe it was working and i just didn't realize it

[Kal-Kevin]

is a dual live well system?
the reason I ask is mine a dual system and I have it set up to take water from one and dump it in the other live well. that way I know the water is fresh when ever I run it for a few minutes

[lugnut]

hey kevin, it's a single livewell system.

if i remember correctly, the big problem that i had was that it put more water in than it could drain so it would overflow when i tried to run it.

[Kal-Kevin]

Ok my friend has the single well and he found his was plugged from the factory. The hole was block he said and he took a wire found where it was blocked and was able to open it up the rest of the way. I do not know what he did to open it he never said and I never asked.

the only thing I can think of other wise is to slow the in take of water down to a level that it will drain as fast as it fills!

[lugnut]

your right, it would be a little easier to put a lower volume pump on it to get it evened out. i'll check it for blocks too just in case

[unchained186]

I had a boat with a livewell setup like that with the pvc pipe mine overflowed I just cut the pipe shorter and it fixed it I fished alot of tournaments in that boat never lost a  fish