That said, I think others and myself have also observed that ADA As leaches high amounts of NH4 as well, for about 1 month till the bacteria take over basically.
So the NH4 might be some of it..........but...........ADA AS also adds a fair amount of peat and this drops the pH way down for about 1 month really strongly also.
They also suggest 2-3x a week water changes during this time as well.
We can also have cases where we have high fish loads, or dose say up to .8ppm per day of NH4 etc.
How much gets to the plants and how much is converted/transformed into NO3 remains to be answered.(This can be measured by aquarist IF THEY ARE CLEVER)
Or if the NH4 makes it in significant amounts to the algae, also remain and likely outside the ability of aquarist to test.
I think that NH4 alone is not a trigger by itself for some algae.
I think we also need high light and CO2 variation in conjunction.
Many who have used soils, WC etc.....have not done the required water changes initially, or had too much light, poor CO2 etc........while others, particularly ADA AS users..have not had much issues.
I do not think NH4 alone plays a strong role.
pH drops with peat, water change frequencies, light PAR(something rarely ever tested), age of the sediment in the tank, CO2 etc.........
Now it's a lot more complex than a simple NH4 model I hypothesized some 10 years ago.
But.....my test could have had issues like high light(It did) and poor CO2( perhapos, hard to say either way given I used pH/KH and it could have been off by 10-20ppm).
I did not use peat, but others have reported it helps initially with some species of algae, you get mostly just diatoms which are easy to deal with.
I cannot go around telling folks lies and not accepting these results/observations about NH4, they falsify my old hypothesis.
I have to let it go and see what else I can come up with.
If you dose a lot of NH4 to a tank and the light/CO2 are "fragile", then even a well established tank can get a nasty algae bloom.
So it's part of the equation I would suspect, but certainly not all of it.
Regards,
Tom Barr