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Dreaded algae - hair

lstratton said:
okay, I'll keep on going with it. ARGH! I hate doing daily water changes when I have to take 120l out!
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If you're dosing Excel or Easycarbo then I think you'll be able to go with water changes every other day or twice a week. Especially if you give the tank and filter a really good clean when you have time and remove every bit of detritus you can. If you take your daily dose of Excel and put it in a pipette/syringe then you can squirt the dose directly onto the leaves with the most algae on and this will help kill those bits of algae off - you should see them bleach in a couple of days!
 
Oh that makes it much more bearable. So if I do twice weekly changes and dose with excel, do I still need to keep the lights off for this whole period and what about the CO2? Also I'm guessing I keep going with the original fert programme? How many weeks to you reckon it'll take for the algae to disappear completely???
 
Okay, so I got a little carried away with cleaning the tank last night. I hacked back all the stem plants, ripped out all the carpeting plants so that I could clean each individual plant and I took out any rocks that didn't have plants attached to them.
I also decided to do a little re scape with the substrate, which has given me much more plant space, so I actually need to get some more plants. I need to do a little water than this evening to get out some of the crud that I disturbed yesterday and has now settled and I'm going to replant the stem plants and the pogo, which are sitting in a bucket of water at the moment.
Quick questions though - now that I've done this and my CO2 bottle is empty, do I dose with excel everyday and the usual ferts? I'm going to do twice weekly water changes, so I'll keep the lights on, but at 50% (so the 2 Juwel T5 lights) and at the moment they are on for 8 hours! Is it a good idea to add some new plants in the next week or so? Will this increase in plants, help to battle the algae? I want to get some more stem plants, so was thinking of some Vallis and some more Hygro!
Any ideas would be great. Sorry to have kept this topic going for so long, algae really does like to try and break you. Oh and I'm going to give the filters a good clean this evening as well!
 
Sounds like a good start. I'd avoid the vallis as they can suffer when you're dosing Excel and egt the CO2 back on asap, but apart from that then you should see some rapid improvements soon I think. If at any point the tank doesn't look great I'd do a water change as you can't do too many, but twice a week should be plenty. Let us know how you get on.
 
Thankyou for that. I did a small one this evening to get rid of the crud that had settled and I replanted everything.
I'll leave the vallis out until I get it all sorted then!!! I'll keep dosing excel until I can get another FE (no card at the moment, damn fraudsters!). It is already looking so much better, but a little empty!!!
 
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