the goal is to be able to maintain a peat-enhanced environment without
having to dink around with pre-treating 60 gallons of water every week......
Tossing a contained batch of peat into the tank is the easiest way to do it,
but the containment (while allowing for some circulation or at least seapage
through the peat to occur) has been problematic. Just polling to see if
anyone has had any luck with this method....


For what its worth, I've been using plain old garden variety peat moss for
my pre-treating for about 25 years, and never had any problems (I do make
sure to buy pure peat - no fertilizers or pesticides etc). Tons cheaper than
the "special" aquarium stuff..... I do sift it through a screen to get rid
of the larger stringy bits 9they get tossed into the garden), so pretty mch
what goes into the fish water is the powedery stuff.....

thanks again
--JD


"NetMax" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Apr 10, 9:47 am, "Marksfish" wrote:
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

Mark, I'm glad you replied because I was thinking of that article you
wrote, and you saved me the trouble of finding the link. I'd still
question what is trying to be achieved, and what are the current water
parameters. Depending on the kH, the right peat solution varies from
a little in the filter, to pre-treatment in storage tanks, to not
using peat at all.

NetMax