Lighting is a 10hr straight period using Hagan Life-glo 2 tubes and 1 juwel tube, should be fine

What sort of time period would you think to start seeing the demise of some algae, days, weeks, months?

if your issues are really serious, consider doing a 3 day TOTAL blackout.. itll magicaly remove all of it during that time. Tom has a thread up about doing it, search it out and do the water changes he suggests. Then after that, start dosing EI and you should be onto a winner.

Without the blackout, it depends on how bad things are as to how long it will take.

Thanks for all your help

Things are pretty bad, approx 40% has algae, rest is clear... Will dose EI for a few weeks and measure the difference then make the decision on blackout

Many thanks again

Most algae will not die as a result of changing fertilization schemes. Most will require either pruning away the infested leaves or killing the algae with Excel, bleach or peroxide. Green water will die with a blackout, but I haven't seen other algae do that. Once you get rid of what is in the tank, clean the tank good, then a good fertilization program with adequate CO2 and no more than needed lights-on time, will do wonders in stopping it from coming back.

Hi Vaughn, thanks for that... I prune weekly removing the worst leaves/stems so will keep this up. Hopefully, the leaves that need removing over the weeks should become less and less...?

After dosing phosphates yesterday, in under 24hrs the algae as grown as a guess about a third of its size again

This is the one of the algae types, brown slimy stuff



CO2 is spot on and stable, lighting period is good - how come after I've dosed phosphates does the algae multiply so much?

I'm no expert but that does not exactly strike me as algae. How much and what source of phosphates did you dose? Have you ever dosed phosphate before now?

Hi, I have dosed phosphates before but only for a short period, what do you think it is then?

Its definitely algae, but as vaughn says, you need to get rid of the algae manually by pruning, cleaning etc. This is why i suggested doing a blackout, cleaning everything thoroughly, THEN changing dosing scheme.. that way you can hit the ground running.