Hey everyone,

No matter what I do I get BBA.

I realize that low/fluctuating CO2 levels are the most likely culprit... and for this reason I have done everything in my power to maximize and add stability. I have had my ceramic diffusers *cranking* and my drop checker (with lab grade kH 4 fluid) at brilliant yellow (fish jjjuussstt starting to show stress). Lately I thought I would give an inline CO2 reactor a try. So far I have really appreciated this unit for it's efficiency and lack of bubbles in the tank. Last night my aquarium looked like a bottle of club soda. I'm only running dual 54W T5 with a 2 hour peak of 4x54W T5's. Weeks have gone by and it *always* catches up with me.

So, I need to know what else I am/could be doing wrong.

Let's assume for the moment my CO2 is fine. I'm experienced enough to know that assumptions are horrible, but please humor me for the time being.

What are the next two biggest variables?

Do you think my nitrates are possibly getting low? I am using EI, but maybe they are getting consumed faster than I expect? .... it shouldn't matter ...

I just tested my iron levels with an iron kit (I know... I know) ... and it reads off the charts. I have been adding Barr's CSM+B and 10% Iron chelate formula (6 caps every other day)... could this be the issue?

Please help ... I'm losing hope here and I want to move forward from BBA.

If you give me specific instructions I will follow them (I'll try anything), but please don't give me the standard algae and bba speech.

Regards,

This thread should be helpful.

Thank you for the link.

Unfortunately it is not helping me.

I have used Excel.... I have played with Flow ...
I know how increased plant biomass affects both CO2 & water flow.
I watch my parameters like a hawk (gh 4, kh 4, no3 20, po4 2, K 20)

What else .....

Thank you in advance,

Media-

My hierarchy for eliminating BBA would look like this:

1. Good and consistent CO2.
2. Pretty strong flow through all plant beds.
3. Good NPK for the amount of light and plants.
4. Good traces for the amount of light and plants.
5. Consistent water change schedule.

I think you've addressed all of these concerns already, and it seems that you're doing everything right. Is the BBA all over the whole tank, including all plants? Just on older leaves / just on hardscape / just in one area of the tank?

I once had a bad BBA mess on my hands, and Tom gave me the following recommendationsspecifically to address BBA. As opposed to you, however, I knew I had bad CO2 and flow to begin with. But here it is, for what it's worth. Like I said, it did do the trick for me:

This may not be helpful, but I've observed that outbreaks of BBA seem to be restricted mainly to tanks with high iron and/or hard water. Not to say that the high iron causes it, because I'm sure there are many tanks with high iron that don't have it. But personally, I have observed that I can put plants that already have it into my tanks and it withers and dies. I add iron via Plantex CSM +B a couple of times a week but my tap water is less than 5 ppm on GH, KH, and iron (as per my town's water report and also my testing confirms this). I have actually never heard of a serious BBA outbreak where the water was soft or had low iron (not that it hasn't happened, just in my limited experience I see a pattern). Restricting iron completely would obviously have an adverse effect on your plants and may not even be possible depending on your tap water, but overdoing it may only be helping the algae and not really helping your plants, similar to a situation where if you have too much light it gets to a point where it's not benefiting the plants much and it is benefiting the algae greatly so the balance gets tipped.

CO2 may be a likely culprit for algae and particularly BBA in many cases, but if you've addressed that as best you can there's no reason you can't go on to try to address other possible issues too. It's usually a combination of things, not one individual component, that leads to problems. I had ridiculously unstable CO2 levels in my tank a while back and never saw one hint of BBA. So to take the position that unstable CO2 causes BBA isn't exactly correct, it is a common contributor but there are obviously other issues there, otherwise we could cause BBA in any tank simply by adjusting CO2, and conversely we could eliminate BBA every single time just by stabilizing it. CO2 is just one component of the whole grand scheme of your tank's environment, take a look at the whole thing and start eliminating possible issues one at a time and see what the effect is. Each variable is a contributor to the entire circumstances, sometimes addressing one variable works if that particular variable was out seriously out of balance, but sometimes you have to address multiple variables that are all coming together to contribute to your problem instead of having a single-minded approach.

Excel is excellent for killing minor outbreaks of BBA. The stuff turns reddish or purple, then white, as it dies. And many fish eat the dead BBA. But, I have never had success killing large outbreaks of BBA. For those I always just remove the infested plants, remove and use bleach water on hardscape or other non-living materials in the tank. Then, with only a small infestation left in the tank, Excel works. Correcting the cause of the BBA can keep it from coming back, which, for me, is almost always an over grown mass of plants in the tank, inhibiting the free circulation of the water.

Mediaone what is your setup and routines?

All methods suggested here will get rid of BBA. This I know because I had a bad outbreak of Co2 back over a year ago now in my 90gal. The cause then was straight lack of co2 as movement is never an issue for me due to my sump setup and pump flow. I had taken out all the plants from my tank put 1 cap excel in a 5 gal bucket, let it sit for 2 hours, once plants were replanted I double dosed for a week just to get rid of any stray BBA. I have never had a BBA outbreak since getting my Co2 in check and using the misting method which was via R5K initially, then TBarr venturi style reactor and now Mazzei 384 injection.

If you have done all the suggested methods, Co2 is where it's needs to be and still getting BBA then it makes me wonder if you have flow in check? Iron is not an issue IME as I dose fairly high Iron everyday of .20ppm. You use your fish gasping as means to determine high co2 level I use that to determine you still might have low flow issues in your aquarium because if you had good flow and surface movement you will not have gasping fish...well at least mine aren't gasping just 'lil' nosy

In my 20 gal tank I have very high Co2 levels as it gets 24x7 Co2 and none of my fish shows any stress or gasps at the surface. I do have good water movement throughout the tank and surface movement to match...see below




Let us know your tank config, routines, param's...... etc

thank you everyone! here are some more comments:

tcomfort: The BBA always starts on my Anubias and then slowly starts to spread from there. I agree that my flow is fine.
Some other aquariums that I have seen locally have about 1/4 the flow that I do and they are doing very well.
I should mention they are higher light tanks also!

While I have used Excel in the past to pull things around, I have never used it in a spray bottle. I will attempt
that soon ...

Carissa: This is very interesting indeed. Let me mention a few more things:

gH is 4 degrees via a Hagen test kit, and apparently 28 via a pinpoint conductivity monitor. I don't trust the
conductivity meter at this time and so I stick with the hagen. Our water is extremely soft here - no calcium or
magnesium. For example, if I complete a 50% water change I have to add about 2 tablespoons of Barr's gH booster.

Next to CO2 the only other variables I have heard are important to check during a BBA outbreak are nitrate and iron.
I believe my Nitrate to be correct for two reasons: 1) My leaves are not turning red (on the certain species I have
observed to change during low nitrate levels). 2) When I reference check my nitrate levels against a calibration
fluid (20 ppm, made from the directons on this forum) they are always slightly higher than the calibration.

This leaves Iron ... and my Hagen test and dosing seems to be excessive. In the coming weeks I am going to focus my
efforts on the iron and trace levels, while holding the other parameters constant. You mention to watch all variables:
trust me, I only run aquariums in this way.

vaughn: I have had excel save me from some harsh bba disasters

mrkookm: my drop checker looks almost the same, but probably more yellow!!! My flow and CO2 is adequate. That is
a fair amount of iron you are adding there... but if you consumption rate is extremely high than this isn't too
bad. Especially if you reset the levels each week with a large water change. You know, the classic EI approach.
I didn't mean to say I have gasping fish now. I mean in the past I have used their comfort level to help me set
high levels of CO2 in the water. After a few weeks of that I still had bba return.

Oh ya, my tank is running 24/7 co2 at the moment so that I can eliminate any fluctuations.

My lights are 6 hours...

When I first started my BBA issues were largely caused by my big newbie mistake of too much lighting. I was running close to or a bit over 4 watts per gallon on a standard 75 gallon, which was just too difficult for me to keep happy. Cutting back to 2 - 2.5 watts a gallon, changing nothing else, fixed all my BBA issues.

Well, it's definitely not hard water in and of itself being the issue. I'll be interested to know what happens. I don't think it's nitrates in particular, again in my tanks I have run anything from near 0 (accidentally) to 50ppm of nitrates and haven't been able to trigger any bba or really any other algae for that matter by changing nitrates. What's your KH? I'm assuming it's probably low if your GH is low but just curious. I should start overdosing one of my tanks on iron and see what happens.