Algae 0, Roan Art 1

Roan Art

Roan Art

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Oct 7, 2005
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HAH! Defeated the algae beast without a blackout :dance:

Background:
On Dec 25th I got my 75g up and running with 3.2 wpg. This is my Papua New Guinea "biotope" tank. Because of the theme, I had a devil of a time finding the plants for it. They were VERY slow in arriving since I had to order them from 10???? different places. To boot, my CO2 tanks were also late in arriving.

So, from 12/25 to 1/5 my tank sat with no CO2 and not enough plants.

I started getting hair algae. With the advice of everyone here, I threw plants in the tank. Some planted, some floating in their little pots. The algae would not abate. I threw in my son's candy-striped pleco. He did an AWESOME job, but there was too much algae for him to handle.

The CO2 arrived and being an utter novice and worried about my Boesemani (who are very O2 intensive fish) I was hesitant to jack the gas past 15ppm.

The algae flourished.

I threw in 2 SAEs. After a day of being utter pains in the butt to the inhabitants of the tank, they started eating algae. Not fast enough :(

I upped the CO2 to 20ppm and the hair algae started to go away. Instead, I had diatoms and what looked like the beginnings of staghorn (but I could be wrong. It WAS black on the ends).

Then, my water turned green. ARGH!

Did a lot of reading here. Did more reading here. Tested my tap and tank. PO4 ran from the tap at 2.0ppm and in the tank after a couple of days 1-1.5ppm. Nitrates ZERO.

IMBALANCE!!!! You guys said 10:1 ratio, so my goal was to get the nitrates to 10-20ppm. So I bought potassium nitrate from Greg Watson and started dosing.

Every time I added 10ppm, by the end of the day it would be gone. I finally got it steady at 5ppm and the algae is gone! No green water, no brown crap, no hair algae. NICE!

I'm still working on getting the total up to at least 10ppm, but I want to thank everyone here for helping out. Every post that had to do with macros and micros and algae was a big help and I think I read them all.

So,
Thank you!
Roan
 
WhooHoo!!!! :dance: :dance: :dance:
Gotta love it when a plan comes together!!!!

Hmm? Success story sticky? Might be beneficial to have them together...?
 
Good for you Roan !!

I'm on my way...(I sincerely HOPE !)...with my 29 and the algae issues I've had with THAT thing ! Sounds ALOT like what you have stated here ! With mine..it seems to be a lack of nitrates. The plants I have in there are gobbling it all up in a hurry I guess.

Anyway, glad to hear you've finally gotten yours all straightened out ! Hope mine does as well ! :D
 
Thanks, guys!

You know, battling algae is like having a snail problem. A few of them is okay, but if there are too many, instead of throwing a clown loach in or snail killing chemical, find out WHY there are so many and fix it. End of snail problem. Same with algae.

Emg:

I read your thread and it did sound just like mine. Get a PO4 -- phosphates -- testing kit. AP makes a good one. I have both Red Sea and AP. I hate Red Sea. Test your tap water and see what's getting thrown in your tank. Match the nitrates to the phosphates 10:1 and see what happens in a couple of days.

My tank is almost crystal clear now. Happy sigh.

In a week I'll post some pictures. The plants are still recovering. Some are still covered in brown, but it's coming off slowly and I can see new greens and reds for the first time :)

AND my Boesemani are HAPPY! Getting fat, too :o

Roan
 
Roan - I was just going to start a thread like this. I was frustrated to the point that I actually tried the blackout. It didn't do anything but kill off most of my E. tenellus. So, I pumped up my CO2 (I don't know how high it is exactly because I have yet to find a pH test I can read) and started testing and dosing ferts full-on. I only have nitrate and phosphate kits, but I could tell nitrate was too low, so I started adding that. After just a week the algae is noticably dying off. The plants don't look any better really, but I am hoping they will start growing soon. I only just yesterday saw the 10:1 natrate to phosphate ratio, so I will aim for that. I still need to test my tap for phosphates, but I think it is high, so I am not sure I want to go that high with the nitrates. I also need a potassium test kit. Does anyone have one they would recommend? (And a source.)
 
RoanArt. I am in week six of a pressurized CO2 system. Mine is basically self administering with the pH probe, monitor and regulator. I found similar problems--unfortunately I was at an approx 10:1 ratio. I doubled up on the micros and macros and the problem basically vanished. I am going to bump the fertilizers up a bit (maybe 25%) to see if I can eliminate the last vestige of the various algaes.

This was the first week I did not have to prune plants because of algae--sort of nice. My next mission is to begin replacing some of the "junk" plants (the hornwort vanished at week 5) I have in there with plants I actually want to use to aquascape. Foxtail is the next to go. That should happen this week--lol.

Here is a link to a photo showing the beginning of week 6.

http://www.tropicalfishgallery.com/photo-gallery/displayimage.php?album=lastup&cat=10052&pos=0

If you wander through the other photos you will see the progression from one week prior to CO2 until beginning of week 6. I kept a running commentary going on in a sister site to the Tropical Fish Gallery that recapped the trials and tribulations (the Plant Section of that board). It has been fun converting from a very low tech to a higher tech tank. Although a photo of the tank as "low tech" won 3rd place in a monthly "tank" competition at an lfs I frequent. Dang Reef tanks got 1st and 2nd--lol. Go figure. Hopefully i can come up with something striking enough to beat the Reef tanks sometime in the next 6 months.

Good Luck with your tank--Hi Tech tanks are fun.
 
Roan it's great to hear you've won the war, for now at least haha. It's amazing how many people are hesitant to increase fertilizers thinking that will cause algae or make it worse when that's the solution! You went about it in a good way though. Measured what you had, knew what you wanted to get at, and did what you had to. I've found that once you get in a fairly regular schedule of dosing that makes it easier and the plants do better as well.

I'm curious about your Nitrate fertilizing. You mentioned that you were adding 10 ppm a day and it disappeared. Wow! So what are you doing currently?
 
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