Peat moss

[lellison]

ok...so I have read in several places that peat moss can help lower your pH. Anyone had any experience with this or even heard of it before.

[biggin]

It does, but from what I have seen not a whole lot or as much as people make it out to be.

[glostik]

Peat moss is excellent for lowering your PH , most south americans would love you if you put peat moss in your tank, but its best to have a small amount underneath your gravel or in a bag in your filter. Also it will give your water a brownish hue.

[lellison]

where does one get peat moss? Thanks for the info. No matter how much it lowers it, any is better than none.

[tsunderl]

Garden section of Home Depot, Lowes, or even Wally World. Comes in a bag.

[biggin]

HD has small bags for about$6 and huge bags for $4.....

[AndrewH]

The LFS sells much smaller portions which are under the canister filters' manufacturers normally in the "media" section.

You also want to make sure it's 100% peat moss and not compost with peat moss in it.

[lellison]

thanks guys!

[biggin]

And if you are ever this way before you get any from some where else let me know I have about 19.99 lbs you can have... .

[lellison]

oh, awesome. Thanks for the offer, I will let you know if I do

[arnold]

I used to use it to lower ph in my discus and angel tanks. I just treated my water change pre treat tanks and pumped it in from them, at the time I kept the ph at 5.5. At 1st application I would have to wait for the peat to saturate w water and sink in the pantyhose legs I stuffed full. The ph would at 1st drop to around 4 and I would have to bring it up to 5.5, then after a while, (don't remember exactly its been a while) the pre treat would level off at about 5.5, then some time later it would be at 6.6 and I would have to lower it. I was using 55gal tubs with good aireation and changing 50 to 75% on all tanks daily and that set up would last about two months, then I would have to re-start the pre-treat tanks w new peat. Nice brown hue as mentioned, soft water, angels and discus loved and flourished in that enviro.

[AndrewH]

Paul,

About how much were you using to treat (or pre-treat) 55 gallons of water?

Are you saying the water would go through some pH swings before finally stabilizing?

[arnold]

I was using 3 or 4 stuffed pantyhose legs per barrel, (about 50 gl) but it was sort of concentrated in that barrel and lots of floating peat would get loose, but that was just a changing barrel so it didn't matter. Remember I was changing the water out in the tub every day, so the peat content was high. I let it set about 24 hrs per treatment. I would also set temp and fine tune ph during that time, electronic meter came in handy.
The peat would perform fairly consistently after it waterlogged and sank, but the ph dropping ability would slowly decrease over two months till I replenished. I had the peat to drop the ph, I used the meter to get it at my desired level, the peat sort of acted like a buffer, never had any ph bounces. Like I said I would go from initially raising the ph to 5.5 to doing nothing to lowering it thru the life of the "charge" so to speak.
This worked well for me, folks have used peat to lower and soften water for yrs, the "peat bomb" works well too but although I tried that it didn't work right for my application.