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5 Gallon Holding Tank

CalRed

Member
Joined
18 Jan 2021
Messages
53
Location
Lancashire
My large planted tank has been overrun with algae while I've been away. Im at the point where I'm going to have to consider blackout treatments, chemical and/or possibly starting again. I have a 5 gallon that has a nerite in it at the moment that im thinking of keeping my livestock in temporarily with large frequent WCs. I have 6 corys, 6 amanos and 2 nerites.
Would i be better off keeping the stock in their current tank during treatment or using the 5g as suggested above. I understand its very cramped but with it being temporary and probably better water quality would it be a better option?
 
If you're going to nuke the big tank with chemicals, I'd move the residents to the smaller tank in the meantime, then only move them back once you're happy with results and water changed/removed the chemicals
 
You can do a blackout to treat algae without removing your livestock and it works well, I have done this quite a few times and had no problems, but I would definitely remove the livestock if you treat it with any algacides just in case.

For the blackout, if you can add an extra filter temporarily to add to the flow a bit and help suck up the algae (particularly filamentous algae) that really helps, the blackout often dosn't kill the algae, but it weakens it and so it lets go of the place it was sitting to find a place with more light, so if you have extra filtration it can get caught and trapped in the filters easier. I add my quarantine tank filter when doing a blackout and it makes a noticable difference to the treatment.
 
Thanks shangman.
Ive got large amounts of hair algae and staghorn, presumably from the increase in waste and decrease in flow from plant growth. That with increased natural sunlight i think the balance has just gone full tilt the wrong way.
Im in the process of manual removing as much as i can now.
Would turning up the co2 help while dosing excel and doing a blackout? Its all i have to hand at the moment before i consider other algacides?
 
I have only done non-medicated blackouts. Usually it's advised that you turn CO2 off during a blackout because the plants can't use the CO2 to grow, and the same with excel.
<Here is a good guide from Tom Barr> that uses no extra chemicals.

Sometimes after a blackout the hair algae goes away completely, sometimes it comes back. I've found that filamentous hair algae just really loves light, and will thrive if the light is too high, so I reduced the light which really helped. After a blackout + a weke or two of lower light, the algae disappears. I've only been able to eradicate hair algae in tanks with lots of floating plants, which reduce the lighting even more.

Excel doesn't seem to do anything to hair algae, but spot treatment for staghorn works well. Once I did a blackout in my nano tank for hair algae, and when I finished the blackout the hair algae was gone, but I had a lot of staghorn. I killed it over 2 weeks by adding daily excel spot treatment with the filter off for 10 minutes after. I think it appeared because during the blackout, the filter got clogged with hair algae and the flow was bad, so then the staghorn came. Before you can treat the algae effectively, you have to fix the causes - which is usually an ammonia spike, too much light or not enough flow.

Have you cleaned your filter recently? Before a blackout you should clean your filter to make sure it's running smoothly with good flow, and then clean it again after the blackout to clear out any algae that was caught in the filter. If you think that the algae is from more waste in the tank, then maybe you need a bigger filter, or need to do to more/bigger water changes and substrate vacuuming to get rid of that stuff.

It would be good to see photos of your tank and where the algae is to see if there are more ways to help. As well as how big your tank is, what the filter and light are, etc.
 
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