Green water again!

[yhbae]

Grrrr... (get that out of the way first! )

Couple of months ago, I had a terrible green water problem - I could only see 2 inches into the tank, so I had to seriously cut down the lighting time from 14 hours to 8 hours. After many water changes, the tank has cleared and everything became ok again.

I noticed yesterday that it is slowly turning green again! What can I do to ensure that I don't end up with a green soup again?

Tank: 30g
Lighting: 30w (4.7k) + 30w (actinic) --> 60w in total
Water change: 30% weekly (enough to keep nitrate below 10ppm)
Filter: AquaClear300 + AquaClear Mini
Stock:
- 5 x 2.5-3 inches P Acei
- 1 x 2 inch Yellow Lab
- 4 x 1.5 inch Yellow Labs
- 1 x 2.5 inch bristlenose pleco

This tank is in my living room which is bright no direct sunlight.
I always suspected that it is the actinic bulb that is causing this problem. I have the 25g tank right next to it (planted though) and the water is super clear - never had algae problem!

I am _ _ close to going to the store, buy myself a Hagen Power-Glo bulb, and replace the two 30w bulbs I currently have in the tank. I hope it brings out the blueness of Acei as well as actinic bulb does...

Any suggestions?

 

[Red]

Reduce the light. I also added some filter wool to my internal filter and that removed the green soup in a couple of days. Highly recommend it.

 

[yhbae]

Reduce the light. I also added some filter wool to my internal filter and that removed the green soup in a couple of days. Highly recommend it.

Reducing light - I will do for sure. As for putting wool in the filter, I went against it because I want to remove this problem at the root...

Is anyone using Power-Glo bulb? How does blueness show?

 

[Rubicon]

I suffered the same problem for a while. Now.. while i fixed it, and fixed it good, it was probably a bit of overkill in retrospect. Did it in two stages. Stage one 1) install a UV sterilizer. (the overkill part) Stage two 2) Modify the filter on the new water pump running the UV to hold phosphate remover media within the canister-shape filter.

The result after 3 days? Crystal sparkly clean water clearer than some bottled water I've seen for sale on store shelves. Your biggest problem I think is too much phosphorous (sp?) in the water. Live plants apparently compete for the algae's food supply. I should get more come to think of it.... anyway. Yeah. Get some Phosphate remover media and plug that in. Couple water changes to keep the green murk to a mimimum and I suspect you'll be swimmin clear in no time.

 

[yhbae]

In fact, this tank does have some plants - they don't do very well, mainly because the floating algae covers up the leaves pretty quickly. I need to seriously shake up the plants to make them free-floating again, but some ends up settling down again on the leaves (and rocks). Not serious - just annoying, for now.

I've done 40% water change (slightly larger than usual) and it has became more clear (for now). I've set the timer to have the tank turn on the lights only 4 hours a day until I get a single bulb replacement...

May be I should check for the phosphate level (thanks for the suggestion), but this is the only tank that has this problem. As it happens that this is the only tank that has the actinic bulb... Hm...