Help With Plant Doseing

[aibo210]

Hi

Im about week 2 into my cycle of my juwel rio 125 the tank has plants and 6 zebra danios introduced using safe start!

Now the first week the tank was crystal clear however now im into the scond week im noticing brown diatoms and hair algea im doseing

TPN+ 2ml daily
Easycarbo 2.5ml daily

Running my lights for 10 hrs.

Now I aint seen huge spikes in amonia it does go up to 0.25 on a test kit every 3 days but I ether dose prime to make it non toxic or do a small water change.

Is the dosage correct for my tank? I will be going presurised soon as I get a canister! but for the meantime is there anything I can do to keep algae at bay?


Thanks

 

[lyotim88]

you can shorten the time for the lights down to like 6-8 hours and that should help.

 

[waterdrop]

Its not unusual to have difficulties with algae during cycling, algae only needs traces of ammonia (even traces undetectable by kits) to be triggered. And there are just about always spores around to be triggered. Its been shown that some algae spores can still germinate after 64 years of dormancy. Good water movement, especially low in the tank, plenty of plants, the smallest load of fish possible, perhaps encouraging some emergent plant growth to help gain more total active growth in the tank with attendent nutrient use, all those might help a little. Less light and having siesta's midday are talked about a lot but don't always seem to help much. Its just tough during those early weeks/months, or seems that way to me. Its likely to get a lot better though after the tank settles down and plant growth becomes more pronounced.

~~waterdrop~~

 

[Dave Spencer]

Get more fast growing weeds in there to help reduce the ammonia and get fighting the algae.

Definitely reduce the photoperiod in the early days of a planted tank. Start with around six hours, increasing to nine or so over the next couple of months. Change 50% water daily, or as much as is practical during the first month or so to get rid of those spores WD mentioned.

Otos and Amano shrimp can be effective additions early on, but you may be left with fauna that you didn`t originally want.

Most of all, make sure you have enough healthy biomass at the start, and not too much light. Hopefully, your light levels are sufficiently low to avoid using CO2 injection.

Dave.