More Q's about Hair algae

[PumaWard]

I've been battling BBA for quite some time, going on 2 months. I couple weeks ago I started DIY CO2 injections and yesterday I started fertilizing with Flourish, Flourish Iron, and Flourish Excel.

Water Perameters are as follows (38g Planted, btw)

~7.3 pH
10*gH(going down, had to treat a case of constipation w/ MgSO4.
6*kH
0 ammonia
0 nitrite
? nitrate (I do 2X/week 25-30% WC)
2WPG, lights on 14hrs a day

I tried some cheap shrimp, not sure of the specie as they look kinda like a cross between amanos and ghosts... fish attacked all of them and ate at least one, so actual amano shrimp are out. I have 4 Otos, but I don't expect them to eat it anyway.
My honey gourami and kribs eat a small amount, but not enough to impact much. None of the algae gets over, maybe, a half a centimeter in length. I remove any plant leaves that start to show spread over a large area.

I would also like to avoid taking plants out as everything is infected and the tank looks pretty good except for the algae.

Anyway, I am getting desperate, lfs can't get florida flag fish in, but they said the farwella(sp?) cats might eat it.. any truth to this?

Would also not like to use rosy barbs as I dont want them upsetting my discus.

:shake:

Advice?

Thanks

[djlen]

SAE's are not recommended with Discus either.
You're going to have to keep after it by scrubbing, gravel vaccing and if possible a total bleach treatment of everything. If you have a heavy infestation the total treatment along with a thorough gravel vac. is your best option.
Don't think the Discus will like the total removal of everything, but it may be necessary.

Len

[promethean_sprk]

14 hours a day is too much light for most plants. I cut back from 12 hours to 10 hours/day and the algae was markedly reduced. Many broadleafed stem plants, like H. Difformis and L. Repens will fold their leaves together when they are done for the day. At this point the plants are no longer pulling nutrients from the water column and the algae is given free reign if the lights remain on. I saw this happening in the last hour of light and cut back.

Be careful with the iron, regular flourish probably has enough. I've found that hair algae would go nuts for a couple days when I would do a weekly iron dose. There was also some staghorn algae that I saw for the first time when giving large iron doses. Breaking it up into several smaller doses helped. I've since stopped adding fertilizer that is very heavy in iron.

Since you have discus, you're probably too hot for it, but rootless plants such as hornwart are good for drawing nutrients out of the water. H. Difformis is a good algae buster too and I've heard okay w/ discus.

You might also try using the flourish dropper to inject the flourish into the bottom of the substrate at the base of some of your plants - that'll give them the first crack at it.