Adding Plants To A Cycling Tank

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If algae is a serious issue you often reduce the amount of hours that your lights are on, and completely cover the tank so that no natural light can get in. This is a very basic description of one method, I would head over to planted tank section as they have articles on it.
 
Yes, one of the strange things about algae is that all the types are triggered by the same thing (light plus ammonia) but once you've triggered a particular type and it is the problem in your tank then it helps to understand about that specific type and to see if knowing about it provides any tricks for battling it.

For example, BBA (black brush algae) I believe can be a worse problem when CO2 fluctuates by a larger amount, so larger water changes using water fresh from the tap are going to help the algae. I think it also likes areas of higher flow. Diatoms (brown algae) on the other hand are kind of the opposite about flow and will tend to appear in corners and still pockets, probably near where it was triggered by trace ammonia collecting there and not being moved because of a dead spot in the current.

~~waterdrop~~
 
And how would you know if it was Algae and if so what type? My tank is green cloudy and someone mentioned it could be algae - someone else excess bacteria.....
 
I have been cycling my tank whilst planted.

I made sure no direct sun light hit it and only really let the light on for 8 hours a day when the ammonia was being processed in 12 hours. I would dose it at night and turn the light on, in the morning (timer switch).

I haven't yet had a problem and now I've added some moss balls (algae balls) so hopefully they will out compete any potential algae.

For me I think the success so far is to have the light on only when the ammonia is being processed during the night.

On top of that I've been dosing Flourish and Excel.

Edit: I also have dropped the lighting down to 7 hours now, there really is hardly any sunlight touches the tank so its 7 on and then the rest of the day completely dark.
 
Kellz, if you have water that is cloudy and has a green tint to it, you have what is called green water algae. It is single celled algae that grow floating free in the water and give it the tint you see.

I have tried in vain to grow it because it is a useful food for daphnia which I sometimes try to culture to feed to my fish. The only success I had was to innoculate a large tank of water outdoors, under direct sunlight, with a sample of green water. I then dosed that tank with a low concentration of ammonia as if I was doing a fishless cycle and in 2 weeks I could not see my hand 6 inches under the water's surface in broad daylight. The daphnia that I feed green water will thrive and reproduce readily but they remove all of the green water algae rather quickly from their tank. That means I need to maintain a separate source of green water to feed them. Once summer is over, my feeble attempts to grow green water indoors usually fail rather quickly and the daphnia end up dying out.
 

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