Good to hear that you have been putting in great effort to combat algae
. Just some pointers to address your problem
For lapis sand, there is no ammonia to kick start cycling process unlike aquasoils. your ammonia is probably from fish waste. Presuming your filter is new, for a filter to be considered matured is when there is almost 0 ammonia 0nitrite and nitrate within healthy range.
There are 2 common methods in tank cycling, fishless and with fauna. Even with fishless and using ammonia carbonate to kick start the cycling process of a filter, it can take 2 weeks or even up to a month in some cases, coming from own experience.
There are accounts whereby for 1.5ft OHF have been used successfully, with biohomme. However, fauna is usually introduced at later stage, when the tank has 'taken off' Back to the issue of BB, the idea of a canister is to allow colonization of BB onto filter media such as biohomme or other filter substrate. There is a threshold as to how much waste a particular surface area of filter media can process.
Seachem has flourish which is an all rounder fert that has NPK alternatively they also have N P K seperately. Other commercial brands have MICRO and MAcro sold seperately such as wondergro series.
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