Cool. I'm not planning to have a huge flow over/through it - more looking to
just drop it in a corner of hte tank behind some plants and let it do its
thing.

The tank already has a bunch of peat in it, so I'm not too worried about a
bag of it changing the chem - mostly just trying to make sure the "old" peat
(under the gravel with UGF) doesn't get completely depleted and the
chamistry get wonky....

For what its worth, the peat did a great job dealing with hard, high Ph
water... The fish are happy enough to be breeding pretty constantly, and th
plants won't stop growing (with a plain old hardware store grow light in the
standard cheapo hood as the only light source)........ Its a 125, so its got
a lot of inertia anyway....



thansk again - mostly I was just trying to figure out if anyone had tried
the nylon thing, and if it kept the peat mostly contained (I hate that black
layer on top of everything, and it *can't be too good for the gills....)

thanks again
-_JD


"Marksfish" wrote in message
...
I'm doing something like this now, but want to avoid the whole "big
bucket of water" thing, and be able to go from the tap right tothe tank
(my water is OK, just needs a bit of softening). the idea was to use the
stocking in the tank itself insteadof in a pre-treating bucket..
-JD


Although the stocking works, you have to remember that the peat will
compact with a lot fewer pathways for the water to run through unless you
can give it a squeeze every now and again to break it up. If you do that
though, the chances are that you will have sediment enter the tank.
Another thing with continually running the water through the peat is that
your pH will continually be dropping and you won't have a great amount of
control, possibly leading to a pH crash. This doesn't generally happen
with the more expensive aquarium peat you can buy, but garden peat can
have a ph as low as 5!

Another potential possibility could be to fluidise it as you would a
phosphate remover? Don't know what it would be like and you would have the
same lack of control over the pH, but you wouldn't get the "tracking"
through the peat as you would with the stocking.

Last thought. How about something like a nitragon which fits to the tap,
but instead of a nitrate removing resin you had peat? I'm sure something
reasonably easy could be built along those sort of lines.

Mark