Back to split photo period (24/7 SE)

plants you are growing (anubias, ferns swords) only require lower light so going overboard can easily lead to issues. especially if your tank is not heavily planted. pics of the tank would help assess

for instance... my 30g quarantine tank has some plants in it and just had a single 12" planted + on it. i didn't really dose this tank or care about it but the plants grew 'ok'... then i recently put another spare 12" planted + on it just because... a few weeks later i have a ton of brown algae all over the place and plants stopped growing almost completely.

if i had just kept the light lower it would be totally fine. need to be careful when adding more light! things can get ugly pretty quick.

hardest part of the hobby is to rectify mistakes... when things like this happen it is really hard to 'clean up' and get back to normal. eventually you learn how to never let bad things happen and scale your light/plants appropriately and grow masses of healthy plants. when you do this successfully algae will never really interfere.

Here's my tank.



Sent from my SM-G935V using Tapatalk

Pretty tank, pretty fish as well.
you have a low plant biomass and a lot of introduced ammonia/nitrogen.

will be interesting to see.. and yea when things get out of balance it can be quite a pia to correct.
One of the current thoughts on algae is they use ammonia to both initiate spore hatching to create a competitive advantage over plants.
both your fish and decaying leaves are adding more ammonia than the higher plants can handle giving the algae an advantage in numbers..
Sort of gets to a self fulfilling cycle.. algae attacks leaves, leaves break down releasing ammonia encouraging more algae to germinate..
Low plant growth and leaves "weaken" faster..ect.
At least this is how I currently see it.. YMMV..
so one needs to balance out the plant growth to more of an optimum.
I agree more light probably will help but going from 24/7 mode to 10hr full is probably not the answer..
Running 50% 10hr. and making sure plants have nutrients other than nitrogen "may" work..

You may have just jumped from one extreme to the next.
CO2 should not be limiting "at this point", Fish respiration and natural absorption should be sufficient for now.
Adding it certainly wouldn't hurt but some Seachem Excel (gluteraldehyde) might help (not a big fan but seems quite effective)

Take this as more "food for thought" than a recipe..

Many feel high phosphates and high light are the cause. Think it needs a rethink..

It is frustrating when it doesn't work. Quite rewarding when it does. and does require work.
and once unbalanced it takes more time than most would like to get it back to normal..for the most part..
Keep in mind that 1000 photons over 1 hour is as good as 100 photons over 10 hours..unless you hit the plant limits at 800.. (can ignore that for the most part)
Most aquatics are considered shade plants though..they are not corn..

Know your enemy..
http://aquarium-fertilizer.com/nitrate-no3-and-phosphate-po4-dont-cause-algae-ammonia-does
At bit more correct I suppose:

How we said before, algae spores want ammonia (NH4) and algae needs nitrate (NO3). You are reading this article probably late, because your algae spores became regular algae. But don’t worry. You can still fix it. You have to start adding nitrate (NO3), phosphate (PO4) and all other important nutrients including CO2. It doesn’t make any sense? No, it makes sense. You have to care about your plants, because they aren’t in a good shape right now. Old leaves produce ammonia (NH4) and algae spores become an algae. Fertilizing will cause that your plants will be in a good shape and they won’t produce more ammonia (NH4) so there wont’t be a new algae. Additionaly, healthy plants will eats ammonia so algae spores will suffer. On the other hand, algae which is present in aquarium right now will be grow because it is full-grown algae which eats nitrate (NO3). Yeah, that’s true, but you will remove it after a while and there won’t become another one, because you removed ammonia, so no other spores will become an algae. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

Click to expand...