Algae in new tank (pix intensive)

[sherchoo]

Benny,
I would say increase your lighting. It's true that algae is due to excesiive lighting but also have to consider that when plants are not doing well or not taking up nutrients fast enough, there will be more nutrients for algae to live on. Since plants will 'grow' slower in this case, algae will soon overwhelm the plants and smother it to death (me lecturing on algae from vinz today).

[tawauboy]

if you have high light, you can reduce the photo period.
i am having 3.7w/gallon and i was having 12hrs photo period. i had spot algae on slow growing plants and glass. the glass near the water almost turned totally green after 2wks. later, i reduced the photo period to 8 hrs and the spot algae is significantly reduced. now i have increased the photo period to 9 1/2 hours but spot algae growth remains the same.

[vinz]

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On 11/19/2002 11:00:32 PM

Benny,
I would say increase your lighting. It's true that algae is due to excesiive lighting but also have to consider that when plants are not doing well or not taking up nutrients fast enough, there will be more nutrients for algae to live on. Since plants will 'grow' slower in this case, algae will soon overwhelm the plants and smother it to death (me lecturing on algae from vinz today).
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Actually, it works backwards too. If you have low-light plants and low light, and want to keep it that way, reduce your liquid fert. Problem is that it's difficult to reduce NO3 and PO4. N comes from fish waste and P from fish food. One way is to reduce feeding and fish load. Another way is to introduce a few fast growing plants that will suck up the excess nutrients, but you have to be careful it does not deprive your other plants of nutrients.

Don't reduce the CO2 though. Due to low light, 20 to 30 ppm of K per week will help photosynthesis and thus nutrient usage.

The key is to balance the factors.

[edwinloh68]

Hi Bene,

You can check out this website on algae. www.algone.com lots of info on algae. hope this helps.

[benny]

Hi guys!

Bought the PO4 test kit from Sera today. Test and found my water to have 0.25 mg/l of PO4. I suppose that is not considered too high?

Now that I have the phospate reading plus the rest of the reading posted earlier, I am really baffled by the growth of the green hair algae and BBA. What else do I need to check to get an idea for a probable cause? Have reduced fert to about half the dosage now and improved circulation of water already.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Cheers,

[benetay]

Having low PO4 value, i top up the P in the water colume to increase the uptake of excessive N and still there's growth of HA too..

I'm still as baffled as benny.