Hows the aireator set up in your livewell.

I’m in the process of setting up my aireator in a removeable cooler for my livewell in my jonboat. I had it set up with a bilgepump and pvc pipe with holes drilled in it. It worked good but in the warmer summer months the water heated up because of the heat coming off the bilge pump when it ran and it stressed or killed the bait if I didn’t catch them during that time.

I’m in the process of putting in a diaprahm pump that has positive pull and not haveing to be primed, to put water in the cooler. I mounted the pump onto the the gunnel of the side of the boat and then drilled a hole twards the bottom under the waterline right below the pump. For a fitting I used a 3/8ths continueous threaded galvanized pipe about an inch long for the through the hull installation. I used a couple threaded nuts normally used for 3/8ths electrical pipe for double nutting on both sides of the boat hull, with o-rings for gaskets. I then hooked the intake hose of the diaphram pump to that fitting and it mounted tight and secure. When drilling the hole through the hull I used a wood cutting drillbit because thier alot cheaper and thought it might be good enough for an aluminum hull and it was and worked great.

I bought a new cooler and am planning to cut a drainhole in the end or side for the water to exit. Because the water coming in, is under pressure and is coming into the cooler faster then a same size hole going out as the drain, im going to drill a hole for the outside diameter of a 1 1/4″ drain pipe.

I want to be able to remove the cooler and put it beside me when fishing for bait so I’m going to use a 1 1/4″ pvc pipe about 5″ long and silicone that inside the hole and around the exit pipe for a fairly secure mount to the cooler. To be able to just pick the cooler up out of the boat I’m going to mount a 1 1/2″ radiator hose to the side of the boathull so I can just slide the cooler, water, exit pipe into the hose, so the water can exit out of the cooler back into the river throuigh the hull.

I will now have a baitwell that circulates river or lake water instead of recirculating and aireating the baitwell water itself. This is the only way I could figure out how to keep my bait in the best shape during the warmer months of July and August to keep my bait in good shape. When I get done I’ll post some pictures of how it came out,,,and no more loosing bait during the hot months out on the water.

For my $$ the best livewell for bait is a cooler with the 12 volt power bubbles aerator with two air stones.

I tried several different methods when I was in 12 and 14 foot jon boats. This is the best in my opinion. And works for gathering bait as well. It is now my bait transport so I dont mix river/lake water with cooler water.

and another perk is that these are really easy on your boat batteries. I have no worries about draining the battery leaving this run 100% of the time. Matter of fact I have left it on for 5 days straight without having a charger on the boat and the battery still had plenty of juice.

Get rid of the aerators that are adding heat to your cooler. the bubbler method that I have actually keeps the cooler water colder than river water in the hot months of July and August. And if your like me, you might have a small cooler of beverages on ice…..change from using ice to freezing bottled water. You can put a frozen bottle into the cooler and that will help keep things chilled if you are worrying about the temp. Bottles can then be refrozen.

Nice post Otis!

You’d be surprised how long a couple frozen 20oz pop bottles will go if they are frozen solid when they go in. I’d say you can probably get a couple hours out of each one depending on how well insulated you are, water volume, air temp, etc.

i use the 1/2 gal juice bottles with screw on tops and get4 hours out of each.

It is true that cold water can hold more dissolved oxygen than warm water. I’m no chemist but it’s my understanding that the relationship between oxygen and water temperature is primarily related to molecular solubility. Oxygen is more soluble (dissolvable) in cold water than in warm water. That being said, cooling your tank water doesn’t necessarily mean you are directly increasing the amount of DO in your tank. Cool water has the capability to hold more oxygen; therefore, by cooling water you are indirectly influencing the amount of oxygen in your tank by altering the physical properties to a state that is more favorable for maintaining oxygen.

I’ve experimented with the ice-water bottles in tanks/coolers before but never really noticed a difference in the health of my bait, so I quit going through the efforts of rotating ice-water bottles. I prefer to simply cut right to the chase by incorporating a large air pump and ample recirculation into my home bait tank. The air pump is the most expensive part of my setup.

My perspective is this: Fish respire (breathe) and thus consume oxygen. To maintain adequate levels of DO you must replace the oxygen that is consumed. Some folks attempt this by cooling the water. Unfortunately you are still in need of replacing what has been consumed. My preference is to use a large pump to diffuse air directly into the water via an aerator rather than relying on water temps to slow down the process. Simple water circulation via a bilge can do this as well, however, not to the extent that diffused air can. For the purpose of a livewell that doesn’t have the luxuries of a home bait tank, primary focus should be on aeration and secondary focus should be on maintaining cool water. You get more bang for the buck with aeration at cool temps, however, cool temps alone do very little in my opinion. Keep in mind, this does not account for the variable thermal preferences of certain bait fish. Bullheads captured from a cattle pond have a much higher thermal tolerance than chubs caught from a cool stream.

On another note, the idea of a bilge pump heating up the livewell water has never cross my mind. I am not denying that it doesn’t happen; I’ve just never thought about it. After reading the above comments on heat from bilge-style pumps I decided to run a little experiment. As I type this my portable bilge pump is running in my bait livewell (cooler). I took temperature before startup and I’ll take temperature in a couple hours. We’ll see what happens….

Regular old cooler full of cold water from the faucet at home, a couple of plastic bottles of ice, and this:

I can keep lots of bluegills kicking indefinitely with this. The only drawback of the submersible pump is that you can’t just leave it going overnight or it will eventually warm the water, especially if it gets plugged, which does happen. Bullheads are just way easier to keep alive, too.

Re: submersible bilge pumps heating up water. At 17:30 the water in my bait cooler was 67.9F. Three hours later, after constant operation, water temp was 71.9F. Air temp never changed (in my garage) so the ~1.3F/hr increase in water temp can be attributed to the constant operation of the bilge pump. Interesting!

I have found the same issue with the water heating up so I make sure to put in some colder water from the house and plenty of it. Don’t want to have it get too hot in there for them, we need our baits to be as comfortable as possible until they hit the water !

That is a decent setup Otis, what you have would be my second choice. I’ve heard that aireating the water does drop the temperature some.