[scolley]

Well, it was an interesting week. But not for any good reasons...

This week was the reduced Fe test. Six days ago I did close to a 90% water change to get any excess Fe out of the water. Then I resumed normal dosing except for two things. I eliminated my Fe dosing. And I reduced my Phosphate target from 2.0 ppm to about 1.4 ppm.


Thread algae
Just like I have demonstrated to myself on multiple occasions, this stuff is linked to phosphates in the 1.8 range (with fast moving water and high light). I didn't change the lights or water speed, yet it is almost gone. Definitely way diminished. Technically it could be the iron reduction. But I don't think so - seen it with the phosphate too many times.


Green algae on the sand
Experience with this tank has me skimming sand, chlorox'ing it, and putting it back, with the algae staying away for a month or two. Well this time I skimmed the top stuff off, and chlorox'ed it. But I didn't put it back. And now - wouldn't you know - it's starting to come back. I think it was a mistake to not put the cleaned sand back. I'll wager that this when I siphon off the top layer of sand some falls back. But when it's covered up soon with an inch of clean sand, it can't reproduce. But this time I didn't replace the sand, so it spread. Bummer.

Well, I can fix that pretty easily this weekend.


Green Dust Algae (GDA)
Boy! Is this stuff persistent. With no added iron for 6 days, it came on strong. I took pictures, but I'm too lazy to put them up. Trust me though, it got bad.

So not adding supplemental Fe did not matter. Maybe (if Travis is right) I've got to go the next step, and reduce micros. I'm using TMG, so it's got a reasonable iron content in it. So last week was far from iron free. But on the other hand, I'm not going to eliminate micros either.

But just because it seemed to work for Travis, I think I'll do another 90% water change, and reduce my micros by 75%. Not for more than a week - don't want to hurt the plants. But it will be an interesting test.



I'm getting sick of this GDA. The other stuff is just a nuisance. But the GDA is getting me down. Tank looks like crap half the time, and it takes work every week to scrape it off. A 180 is too big for that.

Bert H is doing is own test of Maracyn for GDA, to see if he sees the same thing I did. So I'm anxious to see his results. And if this next week of micro/Fe reduction doesn't make a clearly visible difference, I'm going to try Maracyn a third time. And if it works, I'll tinker with periodic small doses to see if that can keep it from returning.

And if it turn out that Maracyn DOESN'T make a difference... as conventional wisdom would indicate. Then I have to go pour over my noted to see what else I might have done that caused it to greatly diminish those two times I did the Maracyn dosing. There's an answer in there somewhere, if I can just tease it out...



PS - I'm running out of room for the discus to swim with all the stem plants growing. Soon I think I'll be able to demonstrate conclusively that having a tank full of healthy growing plants is not the solution to GDA. Sorry Buck. Sounded like a good idea though.