Here's the picture of the set up. It's 100 gallon. I bought 9. They all came one from one breeder. No UV and I covered it with a tarp at night to keep it warm.
It was set up a couple weeks before fish arrival with existing plastic media, that I took from the main pond MB, in the 17 gallon tote shower. I started it with the water from the pond. I thought it would cycle by the time the fish arrived, but it didn't.
Ammonia was between .5 and 2 ppm (with API test kit) during in the first 3 weeks, so I used Safe to bind it and do 50% water change every other day with pond water and used salt at .30%. Ammonia Alert Card showed "Alert" most of the time. At the end of week 3, ammonia and Nitrite were undetectable. I didn't test for PH, but since I used pond water to change, I knew it was between 8-8.4.
For the 1st week, the temperature was between 62 and 68. I only had one heater at the time and It couldn't keep up, so I bought a second heater and was able to keep it between 70-75 for the 2nd two weeks. By the 4th week, I reduced salt to .15% and turned off the heater to match the pond temperature, which was between 68 and 70.
I didn't feed them for first a couple day then started feeding them twice or three times a day and made sure they ate everything within 1 minute. By the 2nd week, all of them ate like pigs.
On day 3, there was an incident with one of the fish. I was watching the fish then I noticed that the water stopped running. Within 30 seconds,I realized that a fish was sucked into the pump. I turned off the pump and saw one fish with a cut on it back and a bulging eye. I thought I lost that one, but it recovered a week later and it still here.
At the end of the 4th week, I moved them to the main pond. I lost one of them about week later. Other than one rot fin, I didn't notice anything else. The gills look OK. There was no legions. Another one stayed on the bottom, but moved around, for 3 weeks. I though I would lose that one too, but I started feed it sinking food and within 2 days it became active and joined the herds. It's very active and always hungry, but I think it has vision problem. Sometimes, it doesn't see food I drop in front of it.