It is still in. I have had it in since Calgary said it was the way to go. I was going to get wood also. Now there is very little color in the water. I may need to add more. I just got the fulval 500 gram pack of peet and put it in the sump. The sump has about 1700gph running through it. So it is getting plenty of flow. I have roughly 360 ish gallons in the whole system.
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Ah. IMO, the prepared peats aren't as good as going the natural route for soft water and tannins.
I use the gardening peat from Lowes.
That huge bag was $14.99. I've been using it since February and I've barely made a dent.
I currently use a dress sock to hold the peat while its in my filters. The garden peat is very fine and seems to escape from pantyhose or the filter bags fairly easily. The sock captures the particulate matter better, but it does take longer to have an effect because it doesn't flow the water as well. Give and take I guess.
I fill the sock with the peat in my garage because it makes a hell of a mess.
Once I have the peat in the sock, I rubberband it shut then take it out back and hose it off. This is a very important step; it removes a large portion of the smaller particulate matter that may escape and get caught in your filters. This step takes a while if you do it right. I jam the nozzle of the hose into the side of the sock and break up the clumps with it. I fill it with water then wring it out. I spray it off while it's on my deck and I'm standing over it. Basically, I switch it up to rinse it with as many different tactics as I can, it's what seems to work best. I normally stop when the little black sand looking stuff stops coming out of the sock.
After I'm done rinsing it, I wring it out, fold it in half and stick it in my AC110. In this configuration it fits perfectly.
After its in the AC110, the water flowing eventually seeps into the water column and the water turns very dark. It looks like crystal clear strong sweet tea. Its dark enough that the fish on the bottom part of the tank can be quite hard to see. Unfortunately the water isn't very dark right now because I pulled the peat from my system when I installed my new filter.
For example, in the picture below, the aragonite is actually bright white, like a sheet of bleached paper. One could easily make the water darker by adding more peat, but I like the water at this shade. Plus I'd have to add more buffer. I had to use the aragonite as buffer because the peat was causing a PH drop in the tank and I was concerned about acidosis. With the aragonite, it doesn't drop much below 6.7 or so.
