Stuck sparge help

First time brewing with my new false bottom....round screen type that draws fluid from underneath the screen. The flow out of it was not that great without any grains. No flow at all with the grain bed. It was terrible....had to use a pasta strainer to recover. Anyone out there have problems with this type of false bottom or suggestions to fix this? Again...I was pretty concerned to start with because the flow was so poor even BEFORE the grain.

Strange that the flow is bad without any grains in it. Have any pics of the false bottom? I have a round one with a bunch of holes in it on the bottom of my MLT that is built in a cooler. It draws water from underneath and I haven't had flow problems.

Here it is, does yours look anything like that one?
http://i15.photobucket.com/albums/a365/Intel486/food/Beer/EDU/beeroatmeal6.jpg

Yes...that is pretty much the same one. It seems that the outlet of the false bottom sits slightly below the ball valve outlet.....but I wouldn't expect that to cause a huge problem unless I was dealing with a tiny volume. See pic below.
https://cdn.homebrewtalk.com/gallery/data/1/medium/Photo_36.jpg

You need a piece of tubing on the outlet barb with a drop of at least a foot for it to drain.

hopmadness said:

Yes...that is pretty much the same one. It seems that the outlet of the false bottom sits slightly below the ball valve outlet.....but I wouldn't expect that to cause a huge problem unless I was dealing with a tiny volume. See pic below.
https://cdn.homebrewtalk.com/gallery/data/1/medium/Photo_36.jpg

Click to expand...

When you tested it, how high was the fluid inside above the valve? You'll need that head pressure to get any flow out of the valve.

Just tested it with ~5 feet of tubing on the outlet valve with the cooler elevated ~6 feet. Made quite a bit of difference. Maybe this was the issue....last night I only had ~1 foot of tubing and elevated only ~2 feet. Thanks for the input guys.