Plant noob

[nfored]

So I left my tank with no fertz or co2 for about 2 months. BBA and hair algea took over, I started dosing excel 3 weeks ago, and started EI two days ago.

My tank is over run with algea due to imporper care, I tried rubbing it off some of the plants but that ended up hurting the leaves. Should I just keep up the excel and EI dosing, and the algea will go away? Or do I have to do something else?

[LiquidEric]

Post your tank specifications:

Tank size
lighting(does it get any sunlight)
filter type and model
gravel type
amount of fish and what you feed them

This info will help figure out what you can do to fix the problem :-)

[nfored]

Tank: 48x16x12

Light: Four 48" T8 Lamps total output 127 Watts, 11K Lumen's, 6500K Color Temp, 89 CRI
Light Schedule: On from 9 am to 3 pm, and then back on from 4 pm to 11pm.
Light Distance: The Lights are about 24 inches from the surface of the water.

Sunlight: I don't think any can reach the tank, if any gets to it from the window, it would be very small amount.

Fish: 3 Dwarf Gourami, 7 Guppies, 4 Neon Tetras, 3 Barbs.

Fish Food: I was feeding them Omega Shrimp pellets, until this last week, at which point i was feeding wardleys. As of yesterday I have discontinued wardleys and started giving them top fin algae wafers.

I feed 2 Times a day, all the food is consumed between feedings.

Filter: Home made 10 Gallon sump, Bio media is Lava Rocks and old gravel from another aqarium. I used the Gravel to seed the Lava Rocks, The Mech Filter is a bounded mat filter pad and Polly Fill.

I have two 3/4 stand pipes feeding the sump. The return pump is a little giant PES-800-PW I would guess The total output is close to 600GPH. However this is not the turn over in the tank As I have the output T'd and feeding back into the sump; to give my plants a break.

Substrat: 20LBS of Schultz Aquatic Soil, and 20LBS of Tahiti moon sand.


What is strang is I only had brown algea on the glass until I did a major clean up abotu 1 month ago. On this clean up I removed every plant, and all the decorations, and cleaned all the algea off of them. Every since then I have had a huge break out of hair and BBA algea. I started to does with Excel, and thought the algea had stopped but I was wrong.

I can Get Pictures if needed.

[jjp2]

you light schedule seems to be too long. Try cutting it back to 6 hrs til you get the algae under control.

You can double dose excel to get rid of hair and bba, I did that for 2-3 days in a row then single dose for 2-3 days and repeated till I got rid of it. Search for posts on excel and algae before doing it though.

What types of plants do you have and how many?

[nfored]

I double dosed Excel for 3 days, this slowed the growth, but my fish where not happy, I had to cut back to normal dose. I will adjust the Lights as soon as I get home tonight.

I am almost to the point of throwing all the plants away, and starting over The algae is on the some much I would have to prune the entire plant to remove all the algae.

The soil is covered in algae the drift wood is covered, the rocks, every thing but the glass. I am so angry I nuked the tank once to get rid of the brown algae on the glass, and ended up with this situation. I would rather clean the glass every two days then look at this problem.

The pants are: 8 Water Wisteria and 6 of some plant I grabbed from a local lake. The Wisteria is doing ok, the other plant is being hurt from the algea.

I forgot to say in the Opening Post, the alge looks like its melting, I had some plants in the tank at first that melted and looked just like this algae.

[nfored]

bump