Mike!!! Your tank is coming along quite nicely!!! The picture never loaded on my phone earlier.
I have to admit I was a little bummed when you said you were going to be keeping the Aquatek after the company had offered to take it back. I'm relieved to see you woke to find it not working...again, this time, a totally different problem!!! Glad to hear you're getting rid of it
When my needle valve failed, it failed in a way it was no longer letting the co2 through. The only way I could get it to produce any bubbles it was shooting out more bubbles than the naked eye could even register, PLUS, the scariest hissing sound occured as well as co2 coming out around the needle valves dial. Needless to say, I have now had my co2 unplugged for just over a month now. I kept my lighting duration the same because I did have quite the plant load already however I did dial back on the amount of ferts I was dosing since the growth had slowed down with the lack of co2. I had decided that if I were to get an algae outbreak, I would lower the time my lights were on too, but so far so good.
Did you treat your driftwood before adding it to the tank? I usually boil mine for 6 hours to kill anything living. The algae might just be due to the tank still being new, plant load and size is still minimal too. Once the plants start taking over, they will take in any nutrients they can get leaving little or none for the algae. Manually remove what you can when doing water changes and try to suck it up while syphoning.
I also ended up with unwanted hitch hikers and decided I was going to turn the tank into a pea puffer tank. Funny enough, when I made the switch to RO, I had to remineralize the water's GH, which ended up being much higher than when I was using tap and the side effect was it killed every single snail and all the eggs!!! I was shocked! In the famous words of Bob Ross, "there are no mistakes, just happy accidents!"
