Yeah, the carnivore pellets that I have to feed to my clown loachs are high
in phosphorus. I have only got around 0.2ppm to 0.4ppm nitrate levels, so I
have sometimes wondered if the high phosphate, and low nitrate level has
stopped my plants growing well enough to use up the excess phosphate, but
they seem to grow quite quickly?. There's definelty an excess of nutrients
of some kind in there though, as the algae grows quickly over anything that
I put in there.


"Altum" wrote in message
m...
Feral Boy wrote:
I'm not sure why, but I have never been able to completely solve the
algae problem in my aquarium. I think its due to the 2.5ppm phosphate
levels in my tap water.

That's gotta suck. I had 2 ppm phosphate in my pond for a while but
didn't get algae. I think it was from the lily fertilizer tablets. There
was hardly any nitrate from the water hyacinth, though. I also go light
on iron ferts in outdoor setups. Have you read Tom Barr's estimative index
dosing? It's at http://www.barrreport.com. He says you can control algae
by limiting trace ammonia and iron rather than phosphate. You limit trace
ammonia with really good biofiltration.

Boiling water is what I use to clean driftwood and anything else I can
remove from my tank for cleaning. I haven't risked using bleach or
peroxide on my plants, and have instead changed them to fast growing
stemmed, and a few fast growing leaf type plants, which outgrow the thin
layer of algae that starts to cover slower growing plants.

I've never bleached plants either, although I've read that it can be done.
I have bleached and scrubbed heaters, filter intakes, airline tubing,
plastic plants, ceramic decorations, and rocks to get brush algae off.
Once I took a sharp knife to my driftwood and whittled the darned stuff
off. In another tank, it only grew on the driftwood so I left it alone.
It actually looked kinda cool.

Thank heavens for Excel and SAEs. Now I hardly have any. All I have is a
couple of tiny specs of it on the leaves of a few plants. (Touch wood)

I did get the phosphate level down to 1ppm when I was cleaning the gravel
once a week , so if that, or excess nitrate is what is causing the
problem cleaning could help.

Seems like cleaning helps everything in fish tanks. :-)

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