Hey there, I'm hoping to get some advice on reducing the amount of algae in my planted Aquarium, I understand some algae is normal and healthy, but I'm having a very difficult time keeping my plants alive as they get coated in algae.
First off, this is my first planted Aquarium, so I know I have a lot to learn, but I tried my best to research ahead and have been searching for solutions for a fair while now and just don't have the experience to really know what the problem with my tank is.
Specs:
20 Gallons
28C/82F
pH: 7.2-7.4
NH3: 0, NO2: 0, NO3: 5-10
I only have the kits for those, and since typically my fish are healthy I'm pretty sure they're reasonably accurate.
Lighting: 2x24W ~10 hours/day
Flourish Excel ~1/2 capful/2 days
Root tab fertilizers 4 every 3 months (I don't have the box anymore for the exact brand, but I think it was seachem flourish tabs)
Background:
I got the tank 2nd hand a few years ago and tried a couple different set ups for fish (zebra danios first, neon tetras 2nd) And was pretty successful cycling the tank and keeping the fish alive with plastic plants/rocks/etc. The light that came with the tank was 1x15W and probably very old (in hindsight), since no algae grew at all back then.
About a year ago I decided to try my hand at some plants and under the advice of the local pet store got some Amazon swords, an Anubias, and a couple others whose name escapes me now since they're long dead (only the sword and anubias survived any time at all) I'm fairly confident most of my initial purchase of plants died due to low lighting, you could sort of see them stretching upwards and having there lower half rot away, so it seemed the obvious next step was to upgrade my outdated lighting with my current more powerful setup, this was about 6 months ago.
At first it seemed to help, the surviving swords seemed to start growing noticeably and the anubias well, it got a new leaf or two at least, but I quickly noticed some algae start growing on the glass for the first time, so I added 2 Oto's to the tank to help keep it under control a bit, there were also 15 neon tetras or so during all this.
Unfortunately as time passed instead of just mild algae that didn't really bother me on glass/rocks I started to get thicker more furry stuff growing on the plants, pictures below, I assume its something like beard algae, but I'm not really sure. That's the real problem stuff anyway, I can't get it off the leaves without destroying the leaves and the oto's don't seem to make a dent in it. I also noticed some long strandy hair algae, but that stuff was easy enough to suck up during water changes and remove. I have been pruning back the most afflicted leaves when I can, but literally every single leaf ends up coated, so unless I completely remove the plants there's always more of this furry stuff covering something. I've been taking the rocks/remaining plastic plants out and bleaching them, so they stay relatively low algae, but I don't think that's really an option with living plants.
I went to the local pet store around then to ask for some advice, and they seemed pretty confident a few more Oto's would clean it up no problem, so I picked up 4 more and figured I'd let them give it a try. Apparently they also brought some Ick(probably) home with them since within a few days my tetras ended up getting those trademark white specks and started dying in waves. It's been a few weeks since then and I've managed to get past the Ick outbreak with 2 surviving neons, and the Oto's didn't seem to be affected by it at all since not one of them died.
After that I'm not in too much of a rush to go back to the pet store, and although the Oto's certainly can be seen nibbling away at algae all over the tank, they really don't make a dent in it at all, I manually clean the glass/decorations to try and encourage them to help the plants, but the plants still get choked to near death regardless.
At this point I'm getting pretty frustrated, I'm not sure specifically what I can do next so I was hoping to get some suggestions here, it feels like the plants have become a huge money sink lately, so I'm not really interested in adding a CO2 system or buying more expensive test kits unless there's really no other way, but I have to imagine some more experienced aquarists have dealt with this kind of issue before.
Pic of the overall Tank:
Close up of one of the swords covered in algae:
One of the other extremely pruned back swords also covered and not really growing at all anymore (these guys used to have dozens of leaves all about 6-10 inches long filling up most of the bottom half of the tank)
The poor Anubias is looking pretty much dead, I'm even less convinced I can save it then the swords:
The algae also seems to take over the substrate in no time:
This stuff looks more like hair algae and infests the bottom of the anubias, usually I can suck most of it up, but its gotten very tangly over time:
Thanks for any advice, hopefully I can get some plants to grow in this tank before too much longer
