Hi,

I'm a newbie and have had my 10 gal, heavily planted tank running for almost a month now. In the last 7 days or so I've started to see a thin coating of hair algae on most of my plants.

substrate: 2 inches eco-complete + 1 inch medium/fine pea gravel

Lighting: 2 27watt CF's on 10 hrs/day
GH- 10
KH- 8
PH- 6.8-7.0
1 DIY CO2 bottle

I don't know what all the plants are called but they seem to be growing like crazy, sending out roots and runners.

Fish load added at the rate of 1 species/wk or so: (in order added)

some trumpet snails
3 pepper corys
3 Kuhli loaches
4 amano shrimp
6 cherry shrimp
2 dwarf puffers

ammonia levels have been 0 so far.

The only ferts I've added so far are 5 seachem flourish tabs in the substrate + an initial 2 tsp dose of FloraPride.

I'm going to try the EI fert dosing method using seachem products + florapride for iron. I'm still trying to figure out how many ppm I should be dosing if I dose potassium, nitrogen and phosphorous 3x/wk with iron + traces on the off days.

So, any thought on the algae? Would getting my dosing schedule going help? Or maybe I have too much light? Is that too many fish for a 10 gal? (I don't plan on adding any more fish ever, unless I lose some of these)

I don't have test kits for nitrite, nitrate, phosphorous etc... I'm sort of out of cash for the time being.

Any help or problems you can see with my setup would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Irene