Page 4 - tbas-test-1

-4- TBAS September 2018 ....................

An alternative water treating process: Peat softening will generally give
good results; however it is messy to use on a large scale. Peat should never be
boiled or rinsed with water before use, as this renders it ineffective (Sterba, Gunther
1983). Buy peat from a greenhouse or gardening supply store. The peat will
come in a bale with the pH marked on the label. The more acidic the peat is, the
faster it will soften the water. The peat should be crumbly, since it contains a lot
of parts of partially decomposed plants (Sterba, Gunther 1978).
The peat should not contain fertilizers. An indication of the presence of
fertilizers is an increase in the phosphate PO 4 3- concentration of the water after
peat treating. Since all peat contains some ammonia, testing for ammonia as an
indication of the presence of fertilizer is not easy, unless one knows exactly what
weight of dry peat was added to what volume of water and how much ammonia
to expect in the absence of fertilizers.
I have never had a problem with fertilizers in peat which I buy from the
greenhouses and gardening supplies. I try to get the peat with a pH in the range
from 3.5 to 4.0. It should be placed in a canister filter, such as Eheim, with a thin
layer of filter floss before and after the peat. The author favors the Eheim, since
the water has a long contact time in the cylinder with the peat. This results in
more reduction of hardness in a given pass through the filter. As peat will trap a
lot of air in pockets, it will probably be necessary to restart the siphon more than
once. The canister filter is put into a recycling loop on a large vessel, such as a
55 gallon plastic garbage container, preferably white in color so that the color of
the peat treated water can be seen.
When is the peat exhausted? When the hardness on the discharge of the
peat filter is tested and compared to the hardness of the water entering the peat
filter, and if the readings are the same, the peat is exhausted and should be
discarded. Peat treating must be controlled by total hardness, not by pH as is
commonly believed.

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