My first post here at TBR, I've been wanting to write and thank Tom and the Plant Guru Team for all their excellent aquarium advice and this seemed an appropriate thread to do so.
My wife and I tried to keep a planted aquarium back in the early 1990s, with little success. But, we were good at keeping fish and kept discus for many years, until we moved, and with all the associated activity never set a tank up again.
That is until recently, when we found a local planted tank for sale by a person who was moving and couldn't take it along. The tank is a 90 gallon Oceanic with a fair amount of nice-ish equipment. The price was right and the timing was right, so we purchased the tank, that was two months ago.
The tank was well-intentioned but had suffered from some neglect or inexperience. The BBA was rampant and the growth of the plants seemed distorted with many curling leaves. We broke the tank down to move it and when we set it back up we removed as much of the algae infected leaves as possible (50-80% loss) and bleached all the hard items in the tank, including the top 1" of gravel (Laterite-gravel blend, it seems). We also started reading this forum and applying Tom's methods as best we could.
It took a few weeks to get the tank set up properly, mostly time lost waiting for parts and supplies to arrive for changing the light bulbs and building our own co2 reactor. It also took time to get everything dialed in properly and train ourselves as to what to do to make the tank work. We kept improving tank flow, filtration, lighting, co2 quantity and distribution and fertilization, constantly referring back to this site when we had an issue or a question. During this time every species of algae known to exist made a home in the tank. BBA still popped up, mostly on the gravel and on old leaves, GDA was on the glass, GSA on old leaves and the glass, thread algae grew on some plants, and of course diatom algae was everywhere. These were not particularly serious infestations, but it was there in significant quantity.
We were ruthless with the algae. BBA gravel was removed as it was spotted (every day) and BBA infected leaves were removed. We lost so many leaves that we went to the LFS and bought $30.00 worth of the most inexpensive plants they had just to fill out the tank. We added 9 otocinclus fish, three grass shrimp, 6 nerite snails, and one real SAE to the fish that came with the tank.
And now finally to address the thread topic, we changed 50% of the water and vacuumed the gravel every 3 days.
We also ran the Vortex D-1 Diatom filter while we were changing water and any time we cleaned the aquarium glass or disturbed the substrate material to move plants. The amount of detritus that came out of even the freshly washed gravel was incredible. I think the water changes and the diatom filter were instrumental in helping fight the algae problems. Every time we ran the diatom filter, the filter powder would be green. If that algae hadn't been removed I think it could just spread through the tank. I even believe the diatom filter will remove algae spores and stop it from spreading. Within a few weeks the algae in our tank was reduced by at least 95%. The only algae we still have is a tiny bit of GSA, small amounts of diatom algae and some BBA that still likes to grow on individual gravel pieces. Now we're changing water every 5 to 7 days and running the diatom filter at least once a week or any time we disturb the gravel or clean algae from the glass.
The photos below show the tank as purchased before we moved it, after 4 weeks, and after 6 weeks (2 weeks growth).
