# Help! My rediculous Algae problem. (56k warning)



## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

I posted this on TPT forums but got no replies.
I just redid my 5.5g. This is what it looked like:









a few shots of it set up a week ago:









This is what is covering my entire tank. Glass included (reason for the poor pictures, sorry, camera can't focus)



It's this brown, stringy, slimy nasty stuff that covers everything. I think It's clado.
The plants are still growing, but at a much slower rate. I have no idea what to do. Plants are pearling like crazy though.

2x 27w screw in fluorescents. 6hrs a day. First meltdown was 10hrs.
EI dosing (1/16 KNO3, 1/64 everything else)
Tapwater KH is 10 (should I WC with half RO?)
50% WC weekly.
Substrate: sand, profile, laterite
I got about 60-90 ppm of CO2, fluctuates throughout the day.
No shrimp/fish. Just snails.
Wisteria, riccia, brazillian microsword, and some parrot's feather.

What should I do?


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## epicfish (Sep 11, 2006)

Uh, that's 54 watts of light. About 45 watts of useable light on a 5.5gal. Granted the WPG rule breaks down, but that's a lot of light. I'd drop the light to just one bulb for now until you get the algae under control. The reduced light and your dosing should help.

Clado isn't brown or slimy, unless it's dying clado. You might have diatoms or something else. Think you could get us better pics?


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## Laith (Sep 4, 2004)

And try starting out with much more plant mass, especially fast growers. They can be removed later once everything stabilizes...


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

epicfish said:


> Uh, that's 54 watts of light. About 45 watts of useable light on a 5.5gal. Granted the WPG rule breaks down, but that's a lot of light. I'd drop the light to just one bulb for now until you get the algae under control. The reduced light and your dosing should help.


Basically the two biggest things I'm worried about are my lighting and my substrate. I have riccia and wisteria as huge water-column feeders though so I'm not too concerned about substrate.

Too much light even for 6 hour photoperiod? What if I did something like 1x 27w light on for 8 hours with a 2 hour "noon" period with 54 watts? Or I could just get 2x 15w bulbs... but I think that'd be too little. I dunno.



> Clado isn't brown or slimy, unless it's dying clado. You might have diatoms or something else. Think you could get us better pics?


Oh. It's kinda stringy though. What algae is brown, stringy, and sticks to glass?

I'll try and snap some better pics.


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

Swapped out the 27s for two 20s.

Quite a bit less light, gonna bring the photoperiod up to 7 hrs and do a partial water change with RO water.


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

Using RO water probably won't do much good, but a good cleaning of the plant leaves or pruning off the worst infested ones, cleaning of the glass and doing two or three 80% water changes to get the free floating algae bits, and vacuuming the substrate, would do a lot of good. That is one advantage of these nano tanks - water changes go fast and cleaning goes fast.


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

hoppycalif said:


> Using RO water probably won't do much good, but a good cleaning of the plant leaves or pruning off the worst infested ones, cleaning of the glass and doing two or three 80% water changes to get the free floating algae bits, and vacuuming the substrate, would do a lot of good. That is one advantage of these nano tanks - water changes go fast and cleaning goes fast.


I thought plants grew better in softer water? My water has a KH of 10 so if I did half tap and half RO i'd have hardness of 5?

Also. My tap water is kinda nasty... I don't drink it. I'm worried that it has a lot of weird stuff that may be messing up my water params. The only pertinent test kit I have is a nitrate one and that's usually around 10-15 ppm.


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## houseofcards (Feb 16, 2005)

Fome,

_2x 27w screw in fluorescents. 6hrs a day. First meltdown was 10hrs._
What do you mean by first meltdown was 10hrs and what are the spectrum of your bulbs?

Was this tank seeded from the start? I'm looking at your substrate and is it possible you had anaerobic activity under the sand layer that was realized into the water.


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

houseofcards said:


> Fome,
> 
> _2x 27w screw in fluorescents. 6hrs a day. First meltdown was 10hrs._
> What do you mean by first meltdown was 10hrs and what are the spectrum of your bulbs?
> ...


On my first go of the tank which ended in an even worse algae problem, my photoperiod was 10 hours. This go (second incarnation) I reduced the photoperiod to 6 hours. I just got 2x20w bulbs now and have them going on a 7 hour photoperiod.

They're spiral bulbs, not sure on the K rating. Quite white though. The plants are growing really well, but so is the algae, and that's the problem.

I used some mulm from my 10g to seed the substrate and all the plant mass probably had some good bacteria on it.


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## Laith (Sep 4, 2004)

Laith said:


> And try starting out with much more plant mass, especially fast growers. They can be removed later once everything stabilizes...


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

Laith said:


> And try starting out with much more plant mass, especially fast growers. They can be removed later once everything stabilizes...


Ya I have a lot more wisteria in there than in those previous shots.

I'll snap some pictures when I get home from class.


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

As of 20 minutes ago.

My plan now is to keep the ferts/co2 up, suck out as much algae as I can during water changes, switch to 1/2 RO water, keep increasing plant mass and hope that my plants will eventually starve the algae.

Sorry about the crap picture. Brown = algae, green = plant.


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

217 views, so few replies 

would really appreciate any advice.

My algae keeps coming back stronger and stronger and I have no idea why.
Too many phosphates in water?


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## hoppycalif (Apr 7, 2005)

The only thing I can think of to try is to raise the lights higher above the water. All algae grow in response to light, so reducing the light has to help in stopping the algae. Another suggestion - use Excel, dosing at about 1.5 to 2 times the recommended dosages.


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## Laith (Sep 4, 2004)

You must also have a bit of patience! Changes won't take effect overnight. Sometimes it takes several weeks to start to see the effects of changes that have been made.


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## Guest (Dec 3, 2006)

I'm fighting a similar problem right now, Fome.

My tank is barely 3 months old, 2 months fully planted with C02 injection.
I have a ridiculous amount of light on my tank before I realized that even with shorter photoperiods and dosing, I couldn't fight this brown hair algae I have now.

I have 95W of light over my 29g (which is way too much in most respects), waiting for the 75W to die/wear out so I can change the lighting regimen. Currently, I just unscrewed the 75W and left the 20W bulb on. I may take my research to science of lighting forum for a place to buy something in between 20W fluoro and 75W VHO fluoro bulbs.

I've started about 4 replies similar to this before, just felt like I was spinning my wheels talking about a problem I've been trying to fix (and think I know how to fix) for almost a month now.

Don't give up!


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

Cytrane said:


> Don't give up!


Never!!

Hehe, I appreciate the feedback and words of encouragement.

I'll try to keep updates via pictures in this thread. Who knows, might even turn out looking ok?

Hoppy, I dunno if it's possible for me to make the lights higher. It's just a homemade wooden stand with the lights screwed in the top. It's sandwiched between the tank and back wall to keep it sturdy. This is my "DIY tank" 

Laith, yeah I know but shouldn't algae still be declining at a noticable rate?

I downgraded to 2x20 watts at a 7hr photo period. CO2 is consistently at around 60-70 ppm which I monitor with DIY drop-checker (per your instructions ^^), I'm strictly dosing via estimative index and keeping up with my water changes. There is a ton of plant mass in there now.

The only thing I could think of being wrong is the tap water, which is probably why in the past, my neglected tanks did better than my non-neglected ones (plants/algae took all the excess stuff out of the tap water and through time, the tank reached an equilibrium - my hackneyed theory) so I'm switching to 3/4ths RO water, 1/4th tap to see if there's anything to that. At 30 cents a gallon, it only costs about 90 cents to do a water change, not too bad.

Could there be something in my substrate? It's sand from an old tank that was sitting out for a few months (dry). My plants are all growing fine in it, even the microsword is propogating at a more rapid rate than I've seen it grow. The bottom is schultz + laterite.

Anyways, sorry for the book. I appreciate all the help though.

P.S. Snails are reproducing like mad too, but don't seem to be doing too much to the algae. I wonder what they eat?


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

Well. No more algae. Not quite sure where it all went. My girlfriend's camera is still a POS though, so I apologize about the quality. 

Now I need to figure out what to do with all this wisteria.

Oh, does anyone know what the difference is between HM and HC? I think I have one of the two.


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## BryceM (Nov 6, 2005)

Check the plantfinder and you'll find lots of good info on HM & HC.

Is your water green, or is it just a bad photo?


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

guaiac_boy said:


> Check the plantfinder and you'll find lots of good info on HM & HC.
> 
> Is your water green, or is it just a bad photo?


Thanks. No, the water is clear, that's just the picture. The only algae that's left is a little bit of hard spot algae on the glass and very small amounts of fuzz algae on old leaves.

I'm not quite sure what fixed my algae problem, or whether it was actually anything I did or if the tank was just settling.

I did:
excel dosing
lowered lighting
fertilized more
switched to RO water
added more plants
let my snails reproduce


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## HeyPK (Jan 23, 2004)

It looked like your problem algae was a very soft type. The increasing amount of wisteria helped control it, and, perhaps, something also ate it. I wouldn't cut back the wisteria a whole lot. The algae might come back. Just keep the wisteria trimmed so that light can reach the riccia in the front. If you want to replace the wisteria with other species, do it gradually. In other words, keep the plant biomass up.


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

HeyPK said:


> It looked like your problem algae was a very soft type. The increasing amount of wisteria helped control it, and, perhaps, something also ate it. I wouldn't cut back the wisteria a whole lot. The algae might come back. Just keep the wisteria trimmed so that light can reach the riccia in the front. If you want to replace the wisteria with other species, do it gradually. In other words, keep the plant biomass up.


That's the current plan 

I want the whole thing to eventually be riccia, HC (I think that's what it is) and micro sword) so I think I'll take small sections out and replace with riccia stones. The microsword and HC can just fill in the cracks.

I was thinking for an aquascape of doing a sloping valley type thing.

Once I stock it, it'll probably just be otos and shrimp.


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## Fome (Oct 29, 2006)

Grrr.. I have this cloudy green water now.

Hard to see into the tank. I bought a small internal filter, hopefully that'll help.


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