New planted tank - hair algae...options?
Hi all
After advice on best approach to take. New planted tank (about 7 weeks old), green hair algae starting to take hold and I want to nip it in the bud before it gets to be a problem. Tank is an AquaOne AquaStyle 620, it's now fully stocked, when it was set up I used seeded media from the LFS and have monitored the water quality pretty exhaustively - I work at a lab so am able to throw in the occasional test for more random things.
Early on I had two tiny (<0.5 ppm) ammonia blips, never seen nitrite, and nitrate sits around 1-2 ppm. Phosphate is pretty much non existant at 0.07 ppm (lab test). Total nitrogen (Sum of NH4, NO2, NO3 and organic nitrogen - another lab test) is currently 1.9 ppm.
I'm using stock LED lighting, which I know isn't super powerful, and was just using the built in trickle filter, which admittedly is working very well, but I have since added a small 5V usb powerhead to add an extra 200lph of flow to the tank. This gives me about 700-750LPH of flow in the 90L tank.
I have a few Anubias, a marble leaved sword, a big clump of java moss, several small java ferns, several crypts, and then a reasonable amount of water wisteria and willow leaved hygrophila. Everything is growing, which I'm surprised at as I thought the lighting wouldn't be powerful enough.
My thoughts on the algae are that I need more phosphate/nutrients in the tank as the plants are nutrient limited, or cut photo period (I did have them on at 0630 off at 1000, on again at 1500 and off at 2100) - I'm just concerned dropping the photoperiod will impact the plants? I've cut feeding down from twice a day to once a day also. (I had intentionally been overfeeding trying to get "some" phosphate and nitrate in the tank)
Photo below of the tank a few days ago. I've dealt to the brown hair algae using some Flourish Excel, and I feel I can keep everything in check except the GHA, which is still slowly increasing.
Any ideas?
![Plant Vertebrate Organism Terrestrial plant Aquatic plant]()
After advice on best approach to take. New planted tank (about 7 weeks old), green hair algae starting to take hold and I want to nip it in the bud before it gets to be a problem. Tank is an AquaOne AquaStyle 620, it's now fully stocked, when it was set up I used seeded media from the LFS and have monitored the water quality pretty exhaustively - I work at a lab so am able to throw in the occasional test for more random things.
Early on I had two tiny (<0.5 ppm) ammonia blips, never seen nitrite, and nitrate sits around 1-2 ppm. Phosphate is pretty much non existant at 0.07 ppm (lab test). Total nitrogen (Sum of NH4, NO2, NO3 and organic nitrogen - another lab test) is currently 1.9 ppm.
I'm using stock LED lighting, which I know isn't super powerful, and was just using the built in trickle filter, which admittedly is working very well, but I have since added a small 5V usb powerhead to add an extra 200lph of flow to the tank. This gives me about 700-750LPH of flow in the 90L tank.
I have a few Anubias, a marble leaved sword, a big clump of java moss, several small java ferns, several crypts, and then a reasonable amount of water wisteria and willow leaved hygrophila. Everything is growing, which I'm surprised at as I thought the lighting wouldn't be powerful enough.
My thoughts on the algae are that I need more phosphate/nutrients in the tank as the plants are nutrient limited, or cut photo period (I did have them on at 0630 off at 1000, on again at 1500 and off at 2100) - I'm just concerned dropping the photoperiod will impact the plants? I've cut feeding down from twice a day to once a day also. (I had intentionally been overfeeding trying to get "some" phosphate and nitrate in the tank)
Photo below of the tank a few days ago. I've dealt to the brown hair algae using some Flourish Excel, and I feel I can keep everything in check except the GHA, which is still slowly increasing.
Any ideas?
