Stop fert dosing. Do 50% water change. Sunlight is too strong. Put it away from your balcony.
Algae is consuming the excess fert and light, thus the outbreak.
Hey guys,
Have been a silent reader here for awhile now and just started a new tank in my new place 2 weeks ago. Low-tech setup without CO2 injection.
Tank Size: 60cm x 30cm x 45cm
Substrate: White sand
Filter: Eheim 2073 (Removed all my old media and filled it up with Matrix)
Plants: Anubias Nana (5 packets from Seaview)
Fishes: one $2 bag of feeders (koi and gold fish) to kick start the cycling
Fertilizer: Tropica premium fertiliser (1 pump every other day), Seachem Excel once per week
Tank has been running for 2 weeks now with just a 20% water change yesterday. It is sitting out on my balcony where i monitored it gets direct sunlight from 7-9am and partial sunlight until about 10am. Because of this, I decided not to turn my tank lights on at all to see whether it is getting enough light. So far, I have encountered the following things:
1.) the plants have started having this brown film on their leaves. Could this be due to this being a new tank? It does go away after scrubbing the leaves with my hands though.
2.) algae started growing on all 4 corners of the glass
3.) Fishes seem to be doing fine other than 1 or 2 deaths
Any idea what I can do to improve points 1 and 2? So far, i added a bunch of horn snails to try and clean the algae up but it has been slow. Should I try to shelter the tank from the sun at all? Or should I just let the tank cycle and hopefully clears up by then?
Thanks a bunch in advance!
Stop fert dosing. Do 50% water change. Sunlight is too strong. Put it away from your balcony.
Algae is consuming the excess fert and light, thus the outbreak.
Watch out.. horn snail is brackish water, may not survive on fresh water...
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Serious? I always thought the ones sold in LFS here should already be climatised for fresh water. Seems like quite a few of the guys here use horn snails to control GSA? On a side note, i bought 10 horn snails and have only 4 or 5 left. The bigger ones tend to survive better though.
But it does seem like the LFS I was at was drawing freshwater from a tank of fresh water fishes into the tank holding the horn snails though! Have since decided not to buy anymore horn snails and just rely on the last 4 I have left. Will probably give otos or L183 a try!
Quick update on my tank. I scraped all the algae on the tank walls and bought a test kit yesterday. Ammonia and nitrite reading was 0. Nitrate was about 20ppm. Looks like my tank is done cycling!
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