Red Algae

[Wishful]

I've got a bad infestation of what I believe is red algae. It's forming a black fuzzy fringe on the edges of my plants and hardscape pieces. I've changed around lighting and fert schedules, we're upping water changes, and I've added a rubberlip pleco. Thankfully the otos are doing a phenomenal job on other types of algae, this is the only remaining problem in a recently set up tank.

I'll be taking the hardscape pieces out to scrub clean, and tossing a couple heavily affected plants I didn't intend to keep anyways. I'm considering a diluted bleach dip for the hardier plants, but I haven't tried this before so I'm somewhat leery. Anyone have any luck with this? The plants that are most affected are my hairgrass, anubis nana, and an amazon sword. My rotala indica is also being overgrown with the stuff, but I know I can just prune back to healthy growth on those if I need to.

[phanmc]

Increase the CO2 to around 25ppm and use a 5% bleach solution to soak the hardier plants in for a couple of minutes, leaving out the roots. Rinse the plants out in dechlorinated water afterwards. Scrub and trim back everything else.

[Wishful]

Sadly, no CO2.

I scrubbed the hardscape pieces today, pulled the most affected plants and tried the bleach dip on my sword plant and one anubis nana. I'll have to wait and see how well it does on the algae. Thankfully, we've RO water, so I had as much as I needed to rinse thoroughly as I worked. :)

Since I was reducing the plant mass, I also put in a new sword and more anacharis to fill in a bit temporarily. Also switched from liquid ferts to fert tabs in the substrate.

While my plants aren't beautiful with the algae on 'em, they do still have excellent growth and the older leaves aren't getting ragged, so once I get things settled, they'll fill in nicely to where I can get the affected leaves trimmed out in a reasonable period. Or at least so I hope!