simeseninjafish wrote:

hi velvet, and thanks for answering my post. I've had the aquarium since
November and it is a 180 litre tank. fish wise it's got 2 angels, three
mollies, 2 dwarf gouramis, 8 neon's, two small clown loaches a coolie loach,
and two cichlids which are about 7cm in size. I have planted the tank all
along the back and there are four small plants at the front, and there all
planted in 6cm of aquagrit. I did start turning the lights of after 10 hours
each day for the last month and a half, but it did not seem to do any good
so I went back to 12 hours a day. I also tried blacking out the tank for
three days but both my Siamese fighting fish were killed while the tank was
blacked out, and the black algae remand the same, and the blue green algae
was back after a week. I also had a Chinese algae eater for a couple of
months but he damaged and killed a few of my plants. will it be ok for the
fish if I Hoover the tank daily?. thanks
"Velvet" wrote in message
...


My tank inhabitants were fine with me hoovering daily - I concentrated
on the BGA, I'd dislodge it if I could, then suck it up. Sounds a bit
like what happened to me, it was a while after I had the tank set up
that the black hair and bga showed up - thought I'd got away with it but
twasn't to be.

Sympathies about the fighting fish - I'm assuming they weren't two males
though? I picked off black hair algae (I'd prune the leaves they were
on if really heavy), twizzle a toothbrush in there to mop up some more
of it, etc. My algae crew consist of a dwarf bristlenose pl*c (I
*think* - not seen him for a while now, but there's still scrape marks
on the bogwood), an oto, and 4-5 dwarf flying foxes (voracious algae
eaters when small, less so these days, they're lazy flying pigs!). The
oto and the bristlenose are both worth their weight in gold to me!

How are the plants doing - are they growing well? I added a small
manual floramat CO2 system to the tank, and I *think* that was around
the time I finally knocked the algae on the head, though I'd also just
changed from two internal Hagen Trio filters to a single external Ehiem
classic cannister filter.

The BGA is a slightly different kettle of fish to the black hair, I hate
the stuff with a vengeance. I'd say hoover as much as you can of it up
daily, and consider another blackout at some point - if it took a week
to come back then I think you nearly had it licked at that point, my gut
feeling is that if there are little fragments of it still alive, then
it'll re-seed, but each time you do a black-out (before it's back in
full force) you weaken it further and further.

Where is the BGA located? I used to get hair near the filter outlet,
and BGA in places where the outlet water didn't get to so much. Oh, and
I'm in Surrey, so the water's from chalk boreholes here. Dunno if
that's of any use.

But I did get rid of the bga eventually - took a couple of months iirc,
but well worth it.

--


Velvet