Hey guys,
I had a thread going in the "Introduce Yourself" section for a while. Decided to bring some of my pictures and questions over here to make it easier for those who may be interested in my setup and troubleshooting.

Here are a few pictures of my build:






My system is young. It will only be 2 weeks old tomorrow. I kind of jumped the gun on a few things, as I was rushing to get plants in the ground. A few tips I recommend to those getting started: Build your system, wash your grow medium extremely well, then add to the system and wait a day or two to let cycle through (chlorine evaporation) and any residual dirt/dust settle, then add your fish. I did everything in reverse and lost all the fish I put in due to dirty water, chlorine, and tank shock.

Anyways, I am on my second week and I am looking to add to the fish population. There are only 5 goldfish in the tank and I know they aren't getting the proper amount of poop and ammonia out to the plants. Today I will be contacting local tilapia breeders and picking up approx 20-30 fingerlings. With watching other's tilapia videos, it seems these fish produce a ton of poop! In researching ways to resolve this, I was thinking of incorporating a swirl filter, but I am not exactly sure how in this setup. Everyone that seems to have them are in much larger setups.

I could use the pump to send water to a swirl filter mounted above the GB, which will then send the overflow water in the swirl filter to the GB, but doing this will just bog down the filter in my pump. Another idea is removing the pump from the FT, having an overflow connector from the FT flow into the swirl filter and then move into a sump tank which will then send the water via the pump to the GB's. Seems the best bet, but so many new parts I will be adding to my system. Wanted to get ya'lls thoughts on this before I dive in.

Thanks for all the support this far.