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Brown surface scum

Brown?

Never seen the brown stuff... only milky/cloudy surface scum (bacteria). We are talking about the surface of the water right?
 
Yeah, it's brown on my tank and comes back after a couple of days and I'm about to up my lighting by 50% lol hoping it will help the plants out compete the scum growth as they're growing very slowly at the moment, may up my CO2 a bit too but last time I did the fish were gasping.
 
Try placing the Lily Pipe higher at night.
This will bring in more oxygen and remove the scum.

I had some problems with the cloudy stuff first, but since I do this procedure every day, it's gone.
 
Just increase surface agitation, I get scum in my ten gal if the spray bar is to low on water level
 
Mine looked like a rainbow so,.. Lol
Could be a number of things of witch is out of my skill level, I would however try and remove it,
Get a paper towel, (scent and chemical free) rest on top of scum and quickly remove,
And add more surfice ripples, I'll do some research and see what I come up with

Could be brown algae, could be oils from your skin or the air in your house,
 
It's not oily lol I do remove it every day and do wc every other day at the moment so hoping after adding some media from the missus tank tomorrow it will help speed things along a little as it's only been flooded few weeks so might be as its new tank.
 
Have you recently changed the substrate? AquaSoil maybe? During the first days when I use this sold in a new setup I find some brown bubbles on the surface (looks like bubbles from the substrate with aqua soil powder). I suppose that if you have some oily surface scum (this is cell death, plants melting, etc.) it can blend with it

Jordi
 
Something is adding colour to your surface film. It can be as Jordi suggests some soil or some wood leaching tannins. Also could be leaves. Anything brown in your tank?
 
It may be related to soil powder but also algae, a surface skimmer is likely the quickest solution though its likely time will resolve it as well ...
 
If this is substrate that you moved from your other tank, it's quite easy to generate these "fines" - if you have some very fine netting (I have an ancient fish net), you can also just rest this on the surface at night & remove & rinse in the morning - from what comes out, you'll know whether it's worth repeating
 
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