[wantsome]

A few days ago I made a post on my setup stating I was ready to give up. Not being one to give up so easyly, and after getting a few words of encouragement from people on the forum, I decided to give it another try.

As I'm writing this I'm tearing down the tank and cleaning it up. But I'm not sure what to do or how to retry. Heres my current setup:

5.5 gallon aquarium
14 watt basic strip light
No heater room temp 74 at night 78 day
Pain inert gravel
zoomed 501 canister

I'm getting possitive results growing peacock moss in a bucket with fresh tap water and no light.

But my aquarium is a whole nother story. I'm a seasoned aquarist but I'm haveing a hard time grasping the planted aquarium concept. I set my aquarium up 2 1/2 weeks ago. After a week of being set up I added the moss attached to some wood.

In the end I tried dosing all kinds of ferts (excel, flourish and evern Iron). My moss as of tonight is totaly infestest with what I belive to be red brush algae.

I took the moss off the wood and rinsed it in cool tap water to get the algae out as much as possible. I'm planning on putting it in a bucket of fresh tap water for a couple of weeks or until it recovers. I'm gonna change the water once a week 100% once a week. Because I'm getting better results containers.

I had some moss a while back and it was dieing but it recoverd in the bucket.

I'm unsure of what to do with the aquarium in the meantime to ready it for the moss.

My canister filter is full of bio rings for biological filtration, no carbon, and a foam pad for straining. How important is biological filtration in a planted aquarium? Can too much bio filtration lead to algae?

I'm gonna cut the light durration down to 4 hours when the moss recovers. Because of algae issues and its doing better in the bucket with hardly any light. I'm thinking the moss is growing so slow that the algae is winning the battle.

Can anyone give me some advice for sucsess? Would be much apreciated.

 

[eklikewhoa]

put some nutrient sucking plants in the tank as well to keep the nutrient level at bay....moss probably only uses a slight bit of it and also grows super slow and with you dosing the algae took over.

 

[pittiepride]

I think also that moss prefers medium light intensity and can be a bit slow to take off growing initially. Maybe lower the wattage on your tank for a while and let the moss get established. Can you hand the light higher off the top of the tank to lower the intensity?

Sometimes it can be really hard to watch our tanks kind of crash but we need to be able to try to isolate the problem and when we do a rash of things all at once it's hard to determine if it works or not. So just go slow and see what's happening.

if your moss is growing so well in the buckets maybe try to recreate those conditions in your tank...

kara