4 week old tank - hair algae forest

[gex23]

So my tanks been setup about 4 weeks now.

Diatoms and hair algae appeared initially around 2 weeks ago, while the diatoms are reducing slowly, the hair algae has covered most of my moss / java fern / wood and now stem plants.

This is the setup i'm running / schedule :

- 60 x 45 x 45 cm tank
- ADA Aquasoil substrate
- Eheim 350 creating approx 10x water turnover
- Ecotech Radion XR15FW, with a photoperiod running from 11am to 9pm using the freshwater template, with the intensity scaling from 1% - 60% over the course of the day.
- CO2 injected via CO2art sodastream setup and inline atomizer (2 bps) running from 9am to 8pm
- 5ml Easycarbo liquid CO2 dosed daily
- 25 litre water change every second day using RO / DI water.

No fertilisers are being used right now as I assumed that the aquasoil would be enough to sustain the plants for the first couple of months?

Any thoughts?

 

[Nigel95]

I dose ferts right after setting up the tank. A lot of people will say aqua soil will provide enough nutrients, but better safe than sorry. First 3 weeks lighting at 6 hours and slowly to 8 hours. I don't go any higher. Try going higher in co2 but closely watch your livestock. If there is no livestock crank that co2!

 

[gex23]

Cheers, i'll reduce the photoperiod and also ordered an all in one liquid fertiliser from TNC as a stop gap until the EI fert kit comes back into stock.

 

[doylecolmdoyle]

I would say the lighting period is to long, I run 5 hours on all my tanks and generally algae is under control, also I dose from day one even with ADA soil and keep co2 levels at 30ppm over the lighting period.