Hello everyone,
I'm new. Been reading pages and pages of this forum for a couple of days now, ever since I've discovered your community The thing is, I'd really love to hear your advice on a couple of things concerning my efforts to plant a 200L (55gal I think) tank in an appealing way and deal with the newly discovered algae mess. I'll try to be as specific as I can in describing the situation, so please bear with me..
Intro:
About a year ago, me and my gal' purchased a Juwel Lido 200 (the cube-like tall 55gal tank) to keep a few tropical fish. The intention was to do a lightly stocked "black water" tank, but it kind of steered in a different direction. We never planned on planting the tank much, not knowing ofcourse how beautiful they can be So... We only swapped the internal filter for a cannister one, chose that a layer (about 5cm) of fine gravel (1 - 2mm) be our only substrate and when the tank was fully cycled, over the course of roughly a year, we added fish by fish, and ended up with a stock of:
12 Corydoras arcuatus
10 Ottos
25 Cardinal tetras
4 Keyhole cichlids
2 Ram cichlids
12 Nerite horn snails
Things were going along fine, never really had any algae issues (after the tank matured enough) with lights running 10 hours a day, we weren't adding any ferts, but we did only have one specimen of water sprite that was growing like crazy and a tiger lotus that (ofcourse) refused to grow, but didn't die off either. So we decided to dive a bit more into plant territory and here comes..
The problem:
About 10 months in, I decided it was probably time to change the fluorescent T5 tubes. Instead of keeping the stock config of two "hilite day" (9000K) lamps, I opted for one "day" T5 and one "nature" (4100K) T5 28W lamp plus I added reflectors to achieve better light penetration to the bottom of the deep tank. Almost immediately - tufts of (I presume) BBA started to appear on the driftwood, on some parts of the gravel and so.. We bought a couple more plants to fight the algae for nutrients and tried to scrape the algae off manually. I also read that having more light without injecting CO2 was a no-no, so we bought the "no fuss" Flourish excel and started adding it at a recommended dose (1 cap per 200l a day). I thaught hey, having no soil to feed the rooty plants, might aswell get some ferts too - bought the entire flourish line of products and added a small powerhead to ensure distribution of ferts. So we added to the tank some java fern (regular and Windelov) and anubias plants and attached them to the driftwood, added a pogostemon octopus and hygrophila corimbosa, also some cryptocorines and a taiwan lotus and started dosing the macros and micros at 50% the recommended Seachem's dosages, the reason being - we only do a 50L (25%) water change weekly (been doing so since we got the tank running) after the fresh water's been left to become peat-infused and dechlorinated in a bucket over the working week.
The thing is - I like to measure the water parameters constantly and after dosing the ferts for a month and a half, here are the results just before a WC:
pH: 8
GH: 7 dGH
kH: 5 dkH
NO2: 0
NO3: 5 mg/l (ppm)
PO4: 0.02 mg/l (ppm)
K: 20 mg/l
Now this is all with 2X 28W T5 lights running for 9 hours daily (this falls into low light category, right?). So from what I've read so far on EI dosing of ferts, the recommended Seachem dosage cut in half seems to be adding enough potassium, but not nearly enough phosphorus and nitrogen. Am I correct? The parameters seem to be completely out of balance, meaning the plants can't even suck up the potassium if they don't have enough N and P? The result of this mess is that the plants (except for the octopus and taiwan lotus) grow veeery slowly, and keep getting algae on the edges of older leaves, which I keep pruning away every week, on top of that there's algae growing in strings on the gravel in some parts of the aquarium (don't even know whether it's BBA or brown / hair??) which I try to pick up and remove by hand and scrape all four sides of the glass clean of algae that builds up in a grayish film / layer every week.
I've never been used to having algae in a tank and this is spiraling out of control. I now know that we've already done a couple of things wrong - adding plant by plant, instead of lots of them from the start, and doing kind of half-way trimmed EI dosing for starters.. What should I do to get on track? Cut down on the photoperiod? I've already done a complete blackout for 6 days and the water was crystal clear right after, but in a couple of days, the algae returned. To cure the cause - should I target dose phosphorus and nitrogen to achieve, say, 0.5ppm PO4 and 5ppm NO3?
I'd really appreciate hearing your input as I find it's quite overwhelming to be losing control of the situation. I'd love to see happy plants and happy fish and be dealing with pruning healthy plants, rather than dealing with algae all the time. Please excuse my english, I'm not a native speaker and please see the photos attached to get a better idea of the situation.
Thank you all very much.
I'm new. Been reading pages and pages of this forum for a couple of days now, ever since I've discovered your community The thing is, I'd really love to hear your advice on a couple of things concerning my efforts to plant a 200L (55gal I think) tank in an appealing way and deal with the newly discovered algae mess. I'll try to be as specific as I can in describing the situation, so please bear with me..
Intro:
About a year ago, me and my gal' purchased a Juwel Lido 200 (the cube-like tall 55gal tank) to keep a few tropical fish. The intention was to do a lightly stocked "black water" tank, but it kind of steered in a different direction. We never planned on planting the tank much, not knowing ofcourse how beautiful they can be So... We only swapped the internal filter for a cannister one, chose that a layer (about 5cm) of fine gravel (1 - 2mm) be our only substrate and when the tank was fully cycled, over the course of roughly a year, we added fish by fish, and ended up with a stock of:
12 Corydoras arcuatus
10 Ottos
25 Cardinal tetras
4 Keyhole cichlids
2 Ram cichlids
12 Nerite horn snails
Things were going along fine, never really had any algae issues (after the tank matured enough) with lights running 10 hours a day, we weren't adding any ferts, but we did only have one specimen of water sprite that was growing like crazy and a tiger lotus that (ofcourse) refused to grow, but didn't die off either. So we decided to dive a bit more into plant territory and here comes..
The problem:
About 10 months in, I decided it was probably time to change the fluorescent T5 tubes. Instead of keeping the stock config of two "hilite day" (9000K) lamps, I opted for one "day" T5 and one "nature" (4100K) T5 28W lamp plus I added reflectors to achieve better light penetration to the bottom of the deep tank. Almost immediately - tufts of (I presume) BBA started to appear on the driftwood, on some parts of the gravel and so.. We bought a couple more plants to fight the algae for nutrients and tried to scrape the algae off manually. I also read that having more light without injecting CO2 was a no-no, so we bought the "no fuss" Flourish excel and started adding it at a recommended dose (1 cap per 200l a day). I thaught hey, having no soil to feed the rooty plants, might aswell get some ferts too - bought the entire flourish line of products and added a small powerhead to ensure distribution of ferts. So we added to the tank some java fern (regular and Windelov) and anubias plants and attached them to the driftwood, added a pogostemon octopus and hygrophila corimbosa, also some cryptocorines and a taiwan lotus and started dosing the macros and micros at 50% the recommended Seachem's dosages, the reason being - we only do a 50L (25%) water change weekly (been doing so since we got the tank running) after the fresh water's been left to become peat-infused and dechlorinated in a bucket over the working week.
The thing is - I like to measure the water parameters constantly and after dosing the ferts for a month and a half, here are the results just before a WC:
pH: 8
GH: 7 dGH
kH: 5 dkH
NO2: 0
NO3: 5 mg/l (ppm)
PO4: 0.02 mg/l (ppm)
K: 20 mg/l
Now this is all with 2X 28W T5 lights running for 9 hours daily (this falls into low light category, right?). So from what I've read so far on EI dosing of ferts, the recommended Seachem dosage cut in half seems to be adding enough potassium, but not nearly enough phosphorus and nitrogen. Am I correct? The parameters seem to be completely out of balance, meaning the plants can't even suck up the potassium if they don't have enough N and P? The result of this mess is that the plants (except for the octopus and taiwan lotus) grow veeery slowly, and keep getting algae on the edges of older leaves, which I keep pruning away every week, on top of that there's algae growing in strings on the gravel in some parts of the aquarium (don't even know whether it's BBA or brown / hair??) which I try to pick up and remove by hand and scrape all four sides of the glass clean of algae that builds up in a grayish film / layer every week.
I've never been used to having algae in a tank and this is spiraling out of control. I now know that we've already done a couple of things wrong - adding plant by plant, instead of lots of them from the start, and doing kind of half-way trimmed EI dosing for starters.. What should I do to get on track? Cut down on the photoperiod? I've already done a complete blackout for 6 days and the water was crystal clear right after, but in a couple of days, the algae returned. To cure the cause - should I target dose phosphorus and nitrogen to achieve, say, 0.5ppm PO4 and 5ppm NO3?
I'd really appreciate hearing your input as I find it's quite overwhelming to be losing control of the situation. I'd love to see happy plants and happy fish and be dealing with pruning healthy plants, rather than dealing with algae all the time. Please excuse my english, I'm not a native speaker and please see the photos attached to get a better idea of the situation.
Thank you all very much.