BBA problem

I have a 180g 24x24x72 planted tank, 4.3wpg, 6hr light period, pressurized CO2, DIY 20g sump mattenfilter. DIY Automatic water changer (~10%daily), DIY Auto Doser Dosing ~1/2 EI amounts daily instead of full amount every other day. My CO2 is disolved in the sump using a DIY power head diffuser. I have the CO2 on a timer that turns it off at night.

I thought I was doing good by keeping my CO2 1.0pH below the degassed level.
But I am having some problems with stubborn BBA growing mainly on the short plants in my tank like the microswords which are heavily covered and it grows back faster than I can remove it.

I saw a post where Tom mentioned water circulation as a possible cause. So I'm gonna try aiming the current my returns downward more towards the microswords. Just wondering if you had any other suggestions like, Do I have too long of a light period?

 

Re: BBA problem

My origional plan was to stagger the lighting thru the day, creating a sun rise sun set effect, but I had some difficulties with the all the expensive digital timers I bought for this, and haven't had the funds to get different ones yet. For now I have all the lights plugged into a powerstrip which is plugged into a single mechanical timer. I can kill a couple of them, until I get enough reliable timers to do as planned, if you think it will help. I can also try turning up the CO2 a bit more.

 

Re: BBA problem

Thanks for the suggestion. I'll try that too.

I also discovered another possible cause. Since the EI example doses were not available for larger tanks I had to make a spread sheet to calculate the doses for my ferts. I used it to calculate my doses and initially saw some pearling and all was well. A while back someone else needed help calculating their doses so I plugged their tank size into my spreadsheet (which was half the size of my tank). I must have accidently saved it. For the last few months I've been refering back to my spreadsheet when mixing up the fert solutions and not paying attention to the fact that the tank size was wrong in the spreadsheet and as a result was only dosing 1/2 the amount I should and thinking I was dosing the proper EI amount. I hadn't been seening the expected amount of pearling lately, and think I neglected to mention that in my first post.

Wasn't until today when I was considering tweaking the amounts to try to improve things. In rereading the EI articles I noticed my amounts were off and traced it back to my calculator which was calculating correctly but for the wrong tank size. OOOps.