In my experience excel works wonders for tanks but it will kill your vals or any egeria densa you have . I know this from experience. I do intentionally OD excel though also. I overdose excel regularly and my plants have been growing strong with little to no algae for months now. I tryed the completely no CO2 approach for a while but the Excel provides better growth and less algae. Plus I like messing in my tank and the no co2 approach isn't really conducive to that

Pet mountain and Big Als Online have good prices on two Liter bottles which has lasted me about 3 months in my 75 gallon so far with quite a bit still in the bottle. I'll be able to use excel for over two years before I even get close to the price of pressurized CO2 System.

I was unable to keep healthy looking vals prior to excel anyway. They would send out shoots like crazy but would never get very long before breaking or turning brown. I am still a novice so I am sure I was doing something wrong.

As far as new plants with that amount of light. I have Wisteria, Green Hygro, Ozelot swords, assorted crypts, java moss, Brazilian Pennywort, moneywort, Rotala rotundafolia, and watersprite. They all grow very well with 80 watts of shop lights over my 75 gallon. I use 6500K bulbs. About a month ago lowered the wattage from 160 watts to 80 due to me only being at the house once a week (Construction on the house). The Hygro, Watersprite and Wisteria seem to grow faster with the less light. They are pratically trees and often grow out of the tank. A guy at my LFS is going to be getting me some Asian Ambulia. Hopefully that will fill in where my ludwigia repens are now. I can't seem to keep them alive. I just did a cutting but if you would like cuttings from any of the above except for the swords or the rotala, I could send you some in a few weeks for the price of shipping.

Sorry for the long post

Great responses. I am still kind of trying to figure out what kind of algae I have. I just decided to change my substrate (I didn't like the gravel I had) so I went ahead and took out each plant and cleaned off the algae on them to give them a fresh start. Anyway when I cleaned off the Val, it STANK so swampy, if I had had noseplugs I would have worn them. The Hygro and all the other plants did not smell like this. The algae was really tough on the Val and didn't all come off, even though I gave it a good beating and used peroxide. Maybe whatever is on this is different from my other plants? What kind of algae stinks like this?? The algae on the edges of the leaves of my Hygro wipes off really easily. Not so the Val.

The algae on my tank walls can be a bit tough to get off. Like I have to go over it with a credit card a few times with a little pressure.

So what do you think all this stuff is? Maybe two different kinds of algae?

Also it's worth noting that I had probably too much gravel in the tank and it had been harboring detritus for years. I didn't ever vacuum it very deeply. Well it's all gone now, plus several big yucky chunks of dead bga that were hiding down there too.

The worst smelling algae is blue green algae. So, that was probably on the Vals. I never noticed mine smelling at all when I had some.

I couldn't smell it either but my wife would gag as soon I took the top off the tank, lol.

The tank doesn't smell, but when I took the plant out of the water, look out!

Also I noticed some of the leaves on my Hygro plants dying on the edges. It was probably where I wiped them with peroxide, since it is the leaves with algae on them that are dying along the edges. Hopefully the leaves will grow back quickly. I'm going to try to get some co2 going now to help them out. If anyone has any good recipes for yeast concoctions that would be a great help. I have quick rise yeast so hopefully it will work ok.