Bba

[flippajh]

Hi

Have a Fluval Roma 200, Aquis 1000 filter, 60 watt of lighting, typical community fish, and quite a lot of plants, vallis, crypts, Amazon swords. Dorset pea gravel substrate. I do a 20% water change weekly using a standard de-chlorinator.

I have pretty bad BBA on all the plants and filter outlet, and also on one piece of bogwood only what looks like a very fine moss. I have a BN plec who doesn't seem to touch the wood and also have just purchased some Apple snails as thought they might like the algae.

After reading up on here, it looks like I should get some Seachem Excel Flourish and cut down on the water changes and that might help a bit. Is that the correct way to go?

In the water change I did last week, I did give some of the worst plans a bit of a trim. The Valiis is very thick in it where it floats in front of the water outlet, the base of the plants are completely clear of it, and also on the highest leaves of the amazon swords. The new lower leaves don't have any on. There appears to be a good flow round the tank.

Is it worth taking out the wood with the green moss like algae and giving it a good scrub down out of the tank or will the seaachem flourish help with this also.

Thanks

 

[Neesmo]

We have had the same issue on my girlfriends 25 gallon planted tank and we have had some good success with the florish excel. We have been over dosing our tank for about 10 days now and the bba is almost all dead. We have added a hydor nano powerhead for circulation to help the initial problem. All BBA is mostly grey now but on some of the more pourus plant surfaces its only now turning red. I plan to continue until we cant see any BBA left, and then another day or so. Seems to work for us with our normal weekly water changes.

The down side.. I had a new adition to the tank and I ended up loosing her. im assuming the poor little baby ram died because of the over dosing of excel, as its a very established setup. I was carefully watching all inhabitants but I didnt catch that one fast enough. She was the only one to show any signs of poor health, but the only baby fish at the time. Personally I wouldnt use the excel treatment without doing a quarantine on any small fish, and of course any invertibrates into a separate tank.
I also learned that a lot of the intitial problem might be related to having not enough turnover in the tank, but someone else could confirm this for me. I have read about other solutions, but I'd rather not spread rumours of things that might not even help. im no expert, this is just my experiences.

Fish i had in tank while dosing. older neon tetras, 2" jewel cichlid, 6" pleco, 2x 3" loaches, 2" bolivian ram, 2.5" glass catfish, full size rubber nose pleco, and my poor 1" baby blue ram(RIP)
all fish were and are still healthy throughout dosing

Good luck, BBA is poopy!

Kyle

 

[flippajh]

Thanks for that, sorry to hear about your Ram.

I have nothing new in the tank so hopefully all inhabitants will be ok.

Will get some ordered and see if it starts to help. Perhaps I do need to look at the flow also, must admit when I had my previous tank, I never had a problem with Algae, used the same filter but this new one is a different shape and slightly more capacity, but more lighting!

Fingers crossed!

 

[baron von bubba]

i wouldnt overdose the excel unless you have a large a plant mass.
use a pipett or syringe to dose the recommended amount directly onto the algae. this may "burn" the leaves tho if the algae is on plants, some use a brush to "paint" the algae if its on plants.