Cooler / Livewell for cold water NANF

[Fish Folk]

I rigged up a cooler / livewell for transporting wild-caught NANF back home next week…

The air pump will plug into a car transformer.

[Fish Folk]

Ran an overnight test with a few juvenile Rainbow Shiners. Cooler-Livewell seems to work great…

 

[Odd Duck]

You might consider taking some duct tape so you can fasten a zip bag of ice to the inside of the cooler rather than have it potentially banging around.  You’ll obviously need to dry the area where you want to apply the tape but once it’s stuck on well, it should probably hold reasonably well as long as there isn’t too much tension on the tape.

It might also be enough to use a tray that fits your cooler with the ice bag above the water level.  As long as the cooler doesn’t heat up and the air above the water is reasonably cool, you should be fine.  You could use a bag of ice, a frozen flexible ice pack, or even a cool, damp towel wrapped loosely around the air pump so the air going in is somewhat pre-cooled.  Even a few degrees can make a difference in this type set up.

Overall, looks like an excellent set up!  Good job!  I’ve used coolers to transport fish with air pumps on sponge filters, but never drilled through the lids before, just ran the air lines under the lid since I figured air getting in was better for the setting I was in at that time transporting tropicals, not NANF species.

[Fish Folk]

On 3/9/2023 at 12:28 PM, Odd Duck said:

You might consider taking some duct tape so you can fasten a zip bag of ice to the inside of the cooler rather than have it potentially banging around.  You’ll obviously need to dry the area where you want to apply the tape but once it’s stuck on well, it should probably hold reasonably well as long as there isn’t too much tension on the tape.

It might also be enough to use a tray that fits your cooler with the ice bag above the water level.  As long as the cooler doesn’t heat up and the air above the water is reasonably cool, you should be fine.  You could use a bag of ice, a frozen flexible ice pack, or even a cool, damp towel wrapped loosely around the air pump so the air going in is somewhat pre-cooled.  Even a few degrees can make a difference in this type set up.

Overall, looks like an excellent set up!  Good job!  I’ve used coolers to transport fish with air pumps on sponge filters, but never drilled through the lids before, just ran the air lines under the lid since I figured air getting in was better for the setting I was in at that time transporting tropicals, not NANF species.

Excellent tips!