OK. I'll try asking this question a little differently. A bottle of
peat and whatever else is in it extract is a lot cheaper than a bale
of peat moss.



Not where I live. A bottle of that stuff can run you $5-10, whereas peat is
at the cost of $0 a shovel.



And as a gardener who is concerned about our earth's
natural resources, I use coir instead of peat moss in all of my
gardening projects.



Natural resources? No one said anything about peat moss, "peat" was what we
were asking you to use. Its the sticky black muck that lies beneath the
moss. The moss does not suffer at all, even if you scrape all the muck away
it will grow right over the earth and work its filtering miracle all over
again.





I can't really justify ripping a whole bale of
peat moss from depleting peat bogs just to grab a handful for my fish.



And yet you would buy an overpriced bottled of bog water from people that do
it on a much larger scale. No one asked you to destroy half the Florida
wetlands, literally bend over and take a handful, no more. Put a small
amount of this handful (about grape size) into a cut off pair of women's
nylons. Put the small grape sized piece of peat behind your media. Boom!
You have Amazonian water in your tank.


So I am looking at the various black water conditioners on the market,
and wondering if they really live up to their claims or if
"blackening" aquarium water with whatever method, including peat,
makes any difference at all in practical use.



It makes the water boggy colored for about 3 days (less if you have a really
sweet filter setup) and takes quite a bit of this stuff to maintain the
boggy look. Your looking at cases of this stuff a year if you want to
maintain the look/conditions. I say this from experience as I had bought a
bottle every week when I first set up my Piranha tank. I wanted them to be
as comfortable as possible but it was just not possible money-wise to keep
up buying the stuff. I put a pinch of it into my nylon pouch behind the
filter about once every month...works great.



Sean